Realistic Designs

Inspired By Reality

These are some spacecraft designs that are based on reality. So they appear quite outlandish and undramatic looking. In the next page will appear designs that are fictional, but much more breathtaking. Obviously the spacecraft on this page are all NASA style exploration vehicles, they are not very suited for interplanetary combat (well, most of them at least).

Many of these spacecraft have a table of parameters. You can find the meaning of many of them here

I'm toying with the idea of making some spacecraft "trading cards."

click for larger image

Atomic V-2 Rocket

Atomic V-2

ΔV

8,120 m/s

Specific Power

277 kW/kg

Thrust Power

4.7 gigawatts

Engine

Solid-core NTR

Specific Impulse

915 s

Exhaust velocity

8,980 m/s

Initial Thrust

850,000 N

Maximum Thrust

1,050,000 N

Wet Mass

42,000 kg

Propellant Mass

25,000 kg

Dry Mass

17,000 kg

Payload

3,600 kg

Inert Mass

13,400 kg

Mass Ratio

2.47

Turbopump Mass

1,800 kg

Engine Mass(including reactor)

4,200 kg

Reactor Mass

1,600 kg

Height

~60 m

The German V-2 rocket was an ultra-scientific weapon back in World War 2, in 1944. Unfortunately it only had a payload size of 1,000 kilograms. This is adequate for a small chemical warhead, but too small for a worth-while 1945 era nuclear warheads. If you want to invent an ICBM, the V-2 is just too weak.

Scott Lowther found an interesting 1947 report by North American Aviation (details in Aerospace Project Review vol 2, no.2, page 110). It had a simple yet audacious solution: take a V-2 design and swap out the chemical engine with a freaking nuclear engine! Atomic powered ICBMs, what a concept!

Anti-nuclear activists reading this are now howling with dismay over their narrow escape, but the NERVA will give the rocket a whopping 3600 kilograms worth of payload. That is large enough for a useful sized ICBM warhead.

But the US military managed to design two-stage chemical ICBMs, and the atomic V-2 became another forgotten footnote to history. But if you are an author writing an alternate history novel, you might consider how differently WW2 would have turned out if Germany had developed this monster.

Atomic V-2 ready for launch. Body is covered with insulating blankets to help keep the liquid hydrogen from boiling away.

The tiny sphere in the nose is the nuke. I can't quite make out the figures, but given the fact that the reactor is 1.2m tall, the height looks like 190 feet (58m) to me.

This is from a NASA study TM-1998-208834-REV1. The idea was to take NASA's Mars Design Reference Mission (DRM) and update it. Specifically a throwaway stage with a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) was to be replaced with a reusable stage using an NTR with the bimodal option.

Three 200 kilonewton NTR can easily generate enough delta V to put the spacecraft through the Mars DRM. It's just that it consumes a measly 10 grams of Uranium-235 out of the 33,000 grams of 235U in each engine. It would be insane to throw away the remaining 32,990 grams of expensive 235U (per engine) as the rocket stages when leaving LEO, as per the DRM.

That's where the bimodal part comes it. Instead of using the rocket for about an hour total then either throwing it away or letting it sit idle for the rest of the 4.2 year long mission, put that sluggard to work! You throttle each engine from 335 megawatts down to 110 kilowatts and use it to run a Brayton electricity generator (about 25 kilowatts of electricity per reactor). A maximum of two reactors can be run simultaneously for generating electricity. The electricity will come in real handy to keep the fifty-odd tons of liquid hydrogen refrigerated instead of rupturing the propellant tanks. This will also remove the need for heavy fuel cells for power. And it will make the stage reusable.

Block diagram of a bimodal NTR

Cross section of a bimodal NTR engine (exhaust nozzle is at the top).
4-FA are fuel assemblies, the 235U fuel. When in power generation mode, the exhaust nozzle is closed off by a mushroom shaped plug: 2-Closing Device.

Common Core Bimodal Stage

Structure

2.5 mTon

Propellant Tank

5.98 mTon

Propellant Tank

7.4m I.D. × 19.0m

LH2 RefrigerationSystem (@~75 Wt)

0.30 mTon

Thermal/Micrometeorprotection

1.29 mTon

Avionics and Power

1.47 mTon

Reaction ControlSystem (RCS)

0.45 to 0.48 mTon

NTR engines (x3)

6.67 mTon

Shadow Shields (x3)

0 or 2.82 mTon

Brayton PowerSystem (@ 50 kWe)

1.35 mTon

Propellant feed,TVC, etc.

0.47 mTon

Contingency (15%)

3.07 to 3.50 mTon

Total Dry mass

23.55 to 26.83 mTon

LH2 Propellant

51.0 mTon

RCS Propellantmax

1.62 to 2.19 mTon

Total Wet mass

76.2 to 80.0 mTon

For this study they designed a common core stage, and made a family of designs by putting different payload modules on top of the core. The core has three bimodal NTR with power generation (50 kW total) and heat radiators, a propellant tank with a capacity of 50 or so tons of liquid hydrogen, and a propellant refrigeration system.

For manned missions each of the three NTR is fitted with an anti-radiation shadow shield to protect the crew. If there this is an unmanned mission the shadow shields are left off, which reduces the stage's dry mass by 3.2 metric tons. The unmanned cargo is relatively immune to radiation.

The integral liquid hydrogen tank is cylindrical with √2/2 ellipsoidal domes. It has a 7.4 meter internal diameter and a length of 19 meters. It has a maximum propellant capacity of 51 metric tons with a 3% ullage factor.

The forwards cylindrical adaptor contains avionics, storable RCS, docking systems, and a turbo-Brayton refrigeration system to prevent the liquid hydrogen propellant from boiling off over the 4.2 year mission. The highest level of solar heat for the Mars mission is when the spacecraft is in LEO, about 75 watts of solar heat penetrates the 5 centimeter Multi-layer insulation (MLI) blanketing the propellant tank (the stuff that looks like gold foil). The refrigeration system requires about 15 kWe to deal with the 75 watts of heat.

At the aft end, the conical extension of the thrust structure supports the heat radiator, about 71 square meters of radiator. Inside the cone is the closed Brayton cycle (CBC) power conversion system. It has three 25 kWe Brayton rotating units, one for each bimodal reactors. Only a maximum of two of the three units can be operated simultaneously. The CBC's specific mass is ~27 kg/kWe.

The payload is held on a "saddle truss" spine that is open on one side. This allows supplemental propellant tanks and contingency crew consumables to be carried and easily jettisoned when empty. The saddle truss would also be handy for a cargo carrying spacecraft who wants the ability to load and unload cargo in a hurry.

Common core stage is section from the dish antenna and aft. The payload is the supplemental liquid hydrogen tank and the TransHab inflatable habitat module, attached to the saddle truss.

Unmanned ion-drive space probe variant. The Brayton geernerator is used to power xenon ion thruster clusters

Bono Mars Glider

This is from "A Conceptual Design for a Manned Mars Vehicle" by Philip Bono, in Advances in the Astronautical Sciences, Vol. 7, pp. 25-42 (1960). Actually since I have yet to locate a copy of the paper, this is mostly from David Portree's article in his always worth reading Beyond Apollo blog.

In 1960 the Boeing Airplane Company was working on the X-20A Dyna-Soar orbital glider for the US Air Force. This inspired Philip Bono to envision a huge version for a Mars mission. Just like the Widmer Mars Mission, it was optimistically scheduled to depart in 1971, to take advantage of the next Hohmann launch window. Oh, isn't it just precious how idealistic we were back in the 1970's?

The Dyna-Soar was only 10.77 meters long and 6.34 meters wide at the tips of its delta wings, carrying a single person. Bono's glider was a monstrous 38 meters long and 29 meters along the wing, carrying a crew of eight. The glider is split into two stages, as part of the strategy to blast off from Mars.

Bono Mars mission stack. The upper stage of the glider is attached to the lower stage of the glider. Click for larger image

Bono's Mars mission stack had the glider perched on a habitat module, which was in turn perched on a short booster rocket. This is the core. Six full sized booster rockets would be clustered around the core. Stack would be 76 meters tall and have a wet mass of about 3,800 metric tons.

The habitat module is 13.7 meters tall and 5.5 meters in diameter. Internal breathing mix is 40% oxygen + 60% helium, so it's going to be Donald Duck time for the next thirty months. Module has an inflatable 15 meter radio dish to communicate with Terra. It also has a Pratt & Whitney Centaur engine with 89 kiloNewtons of thrust.

Electricity is supplied by a small nuclear reactor located in the glider's nose. Which is why the crew will be spending most of the time living in the habitat module, as far away from the reactor as they can possibly get.

The boosters use plug nozzles instead of conventional bell nozzles to reduce engine mass and cooling requirements. This is why the boosters in the pictures have pointed ends instead of the usual bell-shaped exhaust. The boosters would have a combined thrust of about 40,000 kiloNewtons.

If any boosters fail, mission aborts with upper half of glider detaching and returning to Terra. Click for larger image

After lift-off, at an altitude of about 60 kilometers, four of the outer boosters would be jettisoned. The stack would continue with just the core and two outer boosters. At 100 kilometers the two remaining outer boosters would be jettisoned. The short core booster continues to burn until the stack enters the trans-Mars trajectory, then it is jettisoned.

If at any point a booster fails, the upper stage of the glider will perform an emergency detachment and do its darnest to land the crew back on Terra.

The stack is oriented with the glider nose aimed at the Sun, to protect the habitat module and its rocket engine from solar heating. The eight crew members leave the glider, crawling through a tunnel to enter the habitat module.

Transit time from Terra to Mars is 259 days. I trust they brought along a poker deck.

Upon arrival at Mars, the habitat module would eject a 9 metric ton capsule containing 256 days worth of eight astronaut's sewage. This would eventually impact Mars' surface, prompting every exobiologist on Terra to howl for Philip Bono's head (now they will never ever be sure if a newly-discovered Martian bacterium is an alien life form or an e. coli fugitive from some astronaut poop).

The eight crew members exit the habitat module and enter the glider. The glider separates from the habitat module and heads for a Mars landing. Meanwhile the habitat moduel uses the Centaur engine for Mars orbit insertion, under automatic control. This means the glider is in for a hot time as it has to aerobrake not only the orbital velocity but also the transfer velocity. But it saves on Centaur fuel. Remember: every gram counts.

Drag parachute. Click for larger image

Landing engines. Click for larger image

The glider enters the Martian atmosphere, slows with a drag parachute, and glides to the landing site. At an altitude of 600 meters it uses three landing engines to hover and gently set down. The glider sits on landing skids with its nose pointed 15° above horizontal (angled for the future blast-off).

(Unfortunately for Bono's design, it was crafted with the assumption that Martian surface air pressure was 8% of Terra. We now know that it is less than 1%. Neither the parachute nor the glider wings would function at all in such a tenuous atmosphere. Oops.)

Removal of nuclear reactor. Note the tiny triangular control surface midway along the forward wing edge. This marks the separation point between the upper and lower glider stages. Click for larger image

The crew would remove the reactor from the glider's nose and relocate it about a kilometer away, so the radiation doesn't kill them. It supplies electricity to the camp via cables that are, you guessed it, about a kilometer long. A six meter living dome is inflated, and a two metric ton Mars rover is unpacked.

The crew will live on Mars for the next 479 days, doing scientific research, until the next Mars-Terra Hohmann launch window arrives. Curse those long synodic periods.

On the eve of the launch window, the nuclear reactor is re-mounted on the glider's nose, and the landing rockets are moved so they can serve as ascent engines.

(as a side note, I use the above image as inspiration when I designed the scoutships for an illustration of the tabletop boardgame Stellar Conquest.)

Blast-off! Click for larger image

Jettison empty Centaur fuel tank. Click for larger image

The upper stage of the glider blasts off into orbit, using the lower stage as a launch rail.

In orbit, the glider rendezvouses with the habitat module. The crew perform an EVA to manually dock the glider to the habitat module, and to jettison the empty Centaur engine fuel tank. This torus shaped tank surrounds the fuel tank for the return trip. The empty was retained until now to protect the inner full tank from meteor strikes. But now it has to go because (chorus) every gram counts.

The Centaur engine does a burn to enter a Mars-Terra Hohmann trajectory. Transit time is about 120 days. Time to break out a fresh deck of poker cards.

Jettison habitat module and nuclear reactor. Click for larger image

Landing. Click for larger image

It is unclear to me from the description if the stack does a further Centaur burn to enter Terra orbit, or if it uses aerobraking. Seeing the strategy of the rest of the mission, my money is on aerobraking. In any event, after the crew enter the glider, they jettison both the habitat module and nuclear reactor (and presumably 120 days worth of sewage). These burn up in the atmosphere, with the reactor causing screams of outrage from the anti-nuclear community.

The glider lands on its skids at a NASA landing site in the desert. The crew open the doors and can now stop talking like Donald Duck. The news reporters take lots of photos as the crew is stuffed into a quarantine unit. True if there were any lethal Martian plague germs the incubation period would probably be less than 120 days, but you can never be too careful with possible Martian versions of The Andromeda Strain.

Basic Solid Core NTR

Overview

RocketCat sez

Now this is design to pay attention to. Dr. Crouch did this one to a queen's taste, with plenty of delicious detail. Even if he did have some outrageous ideas, like detaching the freaking atomic reactor for splashdown and recovery in the Pacific Ocean!

This is from NUCLEAR SPACE PROPULSION by Holmes F. Crouch (1965).

Please note that this is a strict orbit-to-orbit ship. It cannot land on a planet.

The Command Capsule contains the payload, the habitat module for the crew, the ship controls, life-support, navigation equipment, and everything else that is not part of the propellant or propulsion system. It is designed to detach from the ship proper along the "Payload Separation Plane."

The Rocket Reactor is the actual nuclear thermal rocket propulsion system. It too is designed to detach from the ship proper along the "Reactor Separation Plane." This allows such abilities as to jettison the reactor if a criticality accident is immanent, to swap an engine for an undamange or newer model engine, or to return the engine Earth via splashdown.

The book had most of a chapter about returning an engine to various locations in the Pacific ocean where international condemnation was low enough and the problems of designing an ocean-going recovery vessel that can fish the reactor out of the water without exposing the crew to radiation. What an innocent age the 1960's were, that sort of thing would never be allowed nowadays. The illustrations above are provided for their entertainment value.

The propellant tank contains the liquid hydrogen propellant. The payload interstage and the propulsion interstage are integral parts of the propellant tank, and contains hardware items of lesser value than the payload and the reactor. The propulsion interstage also contains the attitude jets. As with all rockets, the propellant and its tank dominate the mass of the spacecraft. A larger propellant tank or smaller strap-on tanks can be added to increase the mass ratio. Note that the main propellant tank is load-bearing, it has to support the thrust from the engine. But the strap-on tanks are not load-bearing, they can be made lightweight and flimsy.

Item

Mass (kg)

Average Diameter (m)

Overall Length (m)

Payload

15,000

4.57

9.14

Engine

6,800

1.52 to 3.05

6.10

Tank (empty)

22,700

7.32

38.1

Tank (full)

90,700

-

-

Sample specifications : wet mass: 112,500 kg, maximum thrust 445 kN, specfic impulse 800 seconds. That implies a thrust-to-weight ratio of 0.4, which is its acceleration in gs when the propellant tank is full. The figures below imply a mass ratio of 1.5, and a ΔV capability of 3,200 meters per second. The spacecraft's specific power is 23 kilowatts per kilogram

The book implied that a solid core engine could be devloped up to a specific impulse of 1000 seconds, with a max of 12,000 seconds (but at max you'll be spewing molten reactor bits in your exhaust). A later design in the book had a specific impulse of 1000 seconds and a ΔV capability of 15,000 m/s (which implies a mass ratio of about 4.6, which is a bit over the rule-of-thumb maximum of 4.0). Please note that the dimensions below were originally in feet and pounds in the book, that's why they are such odd numbers (e.g., 1.52 meters is 5 feet).

Rescue Ship

This is a variant on the basic NTR rocket: the nuclear rescue ship. This is for use by the outer-space version of the Coast Guard.

Note the "Neutron isolation shield" between the two reactors. Nuclear reactors are throttled by carefully controlling the amount of available neutrons within the reactor. A second reactor randomly spraying extra neutrons into the first reactor is therefore a Bad Thing. "Neutronically isolated" is a fancy way of saying "preventing uninvited neutrons from crashing the party."

Reactor

The propulsion interstage is the non-nuclear part of the propulsion subsystem. It contains the propellant plumbing, the turbopump, and the attitude control system.

The nuclear part of the propulsion system is the rocket reactor. This is basically the reactor, the exhaust nozzle, and the radiation shadow shield.

The rocket reactor is designed to be detachable from the rest of the spacecraft.

Shadow Shield

The shadow shield casts a protective shadow free from deadly radiation. Care has to be taken or other objects can scatter radiation into the rest of the ship. Any side tanks will have to be truncated so they do not emerge from the shadow. Otherwise they will be subject to neutron embrittlement, and they will also scatter radiation. The reason the reactor does not have shielding all around it is because the shielding very dense and savagely cuts into payload mass allowance. The shadow shield typically casts a 10 degree half-angle shadow.

Note that shadow shields will more or less force the docking port on the ship to be in the nose, or the other ship will be outside of the shadow and exposed to reactor radiation.

When the reactor is idling, the shadow shield does not have to be as thick. In order to widen the area of shadow (for adding side tanks or whatever), the secondary shadow shield could extrude segments as extendable side shields.

Plug Nozzle

For nuclear thermal rockets, the exhaust bell tends to be about twice the size of a corresponding chemical rocket nozzle. A small concern is meteors. While very rare, the shape of the bell will funnel any meteors into a direct strike on the base of the reactor. This can be avoided by replacing the bell nozzle with a Plug Nozzle.

The basic design uses a bell nozzle, and powers the attitude jets from the reactor. This might not be the best solution. Compared to a chemical rocket, the moment of inertia of a nuclear rocket is about ten to thirty times as large (diagram omitted). This is due to the larger mass of the engine (because of the reactor) and due to the more elongated shape of the nuclear rocket (because of the shadow cast by the shadow shield, and designers taking advantage of radiation's inverse square law). Taking into account the relative moment arms, the attitude jets will have to be four to twelve times as powerful. Conventional attitude jets might not be adequate.

Also note that with this design, the attitude jets cannot be used during a main engine burn. Further: attitude jets are pulse reaction devices (maximum change in the minimum time). Also there is a mandatory delay time between reaction pulses to permit the nozzles to cool off and to allow propellant feed oscillations to dampen out. None of these limits work well with nuclear thermal rockets.

Basic design with bell nozzle for the main engine and attitude jets. They cannot be used at the same time since.

The plug nozzle allows thrust vectoring.

Mr. Crouch suggests that the basic problem is that bell nozzles are not the optimal solution for nuclear engines. He suggests that plug nozzles(aka "annual throat nozzle") can solve the problems. Plug nozzles have problems with chemical rockets, but have advantages with nuclear rockets. Mr. Crouch mentions that wide design flexibity arises from the fact that the outer boundary radius (rβ) and cowl lip angle (β) can be varied. Translation: you can design a hinge into the shroud that will allow the cowl lip to wiggle back and forth. This will allow thrust vectoring.

The plug nozzle may be structurally integrated into the reactor.

Mr. Crouch also likes how a plug nozzle can be structurally integrated into the reactor, unlike a conventional bell nozzle. It is also nice that the subsonic setion of the nozzle requires structural support in the very region where the core exit needs support. What a happy coincidence! The support grid, the plenum chamber, the plug body, and the plug supports could be integrated into one common structure. You will, however, have to ensure that the hot propellant passes through the plug body support, not across it.

Note the reversed curvature of the propellant flow. This allows placement of neutron reflection material to prevent neutrons going to waste out the tail pipe. The propellant can move in curves, but neutrons have to move in straight lines. This will create a vast improvement in the neutronics of the reactor.

Of course there are problems. The biggest one is burnout of the cowl lips. The lip is thin and the exhaust is very hot. The lip will be burnt away unless special cooling techiques are invented (Here Mr. Crouch waves his hands and states that such cooling will only be invented if there is a compelling need, and the desire for a nuclear plug nozzle is such a need. Which is almost a circular argument). Some form of regenerative cooling will probably be used, where liquid hydrogen propellant flows through pipes embedded in the lips as coolant.

Thrust Vectoring

The plug nozzle lends itself well to thrust vectoring, thrust throttling, and nozzle close-off. This is because of the short shroud and the configuration of the cowl lip. Unlike a conventional bell nozzle there is no fixed outer boundary. While the cowl lip defines the outer periphery of the annular throat, there isn't an outer boundary. So all you have to do is alter the cowl lip angle to adjust the throat area, which will vector the thrust (that's what Mr. Crouch meant when he was talking about varying rβ and β).

In the diagram above, variable throat segments A, B, C, and D are sections of the cowl which are hinged (so as to allow one to alter the lip angle). This will allow Yaw and Pitch rotations.

If the pilot wanted to pitch the ship's nose up, they would decrease the mass flow through segment A while simultaneously increasing the mass flow through segment C. Segment A would have its lip angle increased which would choke off the throat along its edge, while Segment C's lip angle would be decreased to open up its throat section. The increased thrust in segment C would force the ship to pitch upwards.

It is important to alter the two segments such that the total thrust emitted remains the same (i.e., so that segment A's thrust lost is exactly balanced by segment C's gain). Otherwise some of the thrust will squirt out among the other segments and reduce the amount of yaw or pitch thrust. With this arrangement, it is also possible to do yaw and pitch simultaneously.

The moment arm of thrust vectoring via a plug nozzle is greater than that of thrust vectoring from a conventional bell nozzle. This is because the thrust on a bell nozzle acts like it is coming from the center, along the thrust axis. But with a plug nozzle, the thrust is coming from parts of the annular throat, which is at some distance from the center. This increases the leverage.

Nozzle close-off means when thrusting is over, you can shut the annular throat totally closed. This keeps meteors, solar proton storms, and hostile weapons fire out of your reactor.

Pivoting each section of cowl lips is a problem, because as you pivot inwards you are reducing the effective diameter of the circle that defines the edge of the lips. The trouble is that the lip is not made of rubber. The solution used in jet fighter design is called "turkey feathers" (see images above). It allows the engine exhaust to dialate open and close without exposing gaps in the metal petals.

Cascade Vanes

Thrust vectoring allows docking within the shadow shield's cover.

With chemical rockets, retrothrust is achieved by flipping the ship until the thrust axis is opposite to the direction of motion, then thrusting. This is problematic with a nuclear rocket, since it might move another object out of the shadow of the shadow shield and into the radiation zone. For example, the other object might be the space station you were approaching for docking. Ideally you'd want to be able to perform retrothrust without changing the ship's orientation. What you want to do is redirect the primary thrust stream.

Jet aircraft use "thrust reversers." These are of two type: clam shell and cascade vanes. For complicated reasons clam shell reversers are unsuited for nuclear thermal rockets so Mr. Crouch focused on cascade vanes reversers. The main thing is that the actuators for cascade vanes are simpler than clam shell, and unlike clam shells a cascade vane reverser surface is segmented. There are five to ten vanes in each surface.

Note that the maximum reverse thrust is about 50% of the forwards thrust.

Each vane is a miniature partial nozzle. It takes its portion of the propellant flow and bends it backwards almost 180°. In the "cascade reverser end view" in the right diagram above, there are eight reversers, the wedge shaped surfaces labeled A, A', B, B', C, C', D, and D'. Each reverser is normally retracted out of the propellant stream, so their rear-most edge is flush with the tip of the cowl lip. When reversal is desired, one or more reversers are slid into the propellant stream. At maxmimum extension, the rear-most edge makes contact with the plug body.

Vane segmentation of the reverser surface eases the problem of center-of-pressure changes as the reverser's position is varied in the propellant stream.

Inserting all eight reversers causes retrothrust (see "Full Reverse" in below left diagram). Inserting some but not all reversers causes thrust vectoring. You'd expect that there would be a total of four reversers instead of eight (due to the four rotations Yaw+, Yaw-, Pitch+, Pitch-), but each of the four were split in two for reasons of mechanical alignment and the desirablity of shorter arc lengths of the vanes. This means the reversers are moved in pairs: to pitch upward you'd insert reverser A and A' (see "Thrust Vectoring" in below left diagram).

I am unsure if using reversers means that it is unnecessary to use the variable throat segments for yaw and pitch rotations, Mr. Crouch is a little vague on that. And the engineering of reversers that can withstand being inserted into a nuclear rocket exhaust is left as an exercise for the reader. There will be temperature issues, supersonic vibration issues, and edge erosion issues for starters. These are desgined for a solid-core NTR, where the propellant temperatures are kept down so the reactor core remains solid. This is not the case in a gas-core NTR, where the propellant temperatures are so high that the "reactor core" is actually a ball of hot vapor. The point is that a gas core rocket might have exhaust so hot that no possible material cascade vane could survive. There is a possibility that MHD magnetic fields could be utilized instead.

But the most powerful feature of cascade vanes is their ability to perform "thrust neutralization". When all the reversers are totally out of the propellant stream, there is 100% ahead thrust. When all the reversers are totally in the propellant stream, there is 50% reverse thrust. But in the process of inserting the reversers fully in the propellant stream, the thrust smoothly varies from 100% ahead, to 75% ahead, to 50% ahead, to 25% ahead, to 25% reverse, and finally to 50% reverse.

The important point is that at a specific point, the thrust is 0%! The propellant is still blasting strong as ever, it is just spraying in all directions, creating a net thrust of zero.

Why is this important? Well, ordinarily one would vary the strength of the thrust while doing maneuvers. Including stopping thrust entirely. Trouble is, nuclear thermal rocket reactors and turbopumps don't like having their strength settings changed. They lag behind your setting changes, and the changes put stress on the components.

But with the magic of thrust neutralization, you don't have to change the settings. You put it at a convenient value, then leave it alone. The cascade vanes can throttle the thrust to any value from 100% rear, to zero, to 50% fore. And do thrust vectoring as well.

Mr. Crouch also notes that while using thrust vectoring for maneuver, the rocket will have to be designed to use special auxiliary propellant tanks. The standard tanks are optimized to feed propellant while acceleration is directed towards the nose of the ship. This will not be true while manuevering, so special "positive-expulsion" tanks will be needed. These small tanks will have a piston or bladder inside, with propellant on the output tube side of the piston and some neutral pressurized gas on the othe side of the piston.

I was having difficulty visualizing the cascade reversers from the diagrams. I used a 3D modeling program called Blender to try and visualize them.

Discovery II

RocketCat sez

This should happen more often. A team of rocket scientist at the Glenn Research Center were inspired by the Discovery from the movie 2001. So they designed one with modern technology that would actually work!

Discovery II

ΔV

223,000 m/s

Specific Power

3.5 kW/kg (3,540 W/kg)

Thrust Power

3.1 gigaWatts

Propulsion

Helium3-DeuteriumFusion

Specific Impulse

35,435 s

Exhaust Velocity

347,000 m/s

Wet Mass

1,690,000 kg

Dry Mass

883,000 kg

Mass Ratio

1.9

Mass Flow

0.080 kg/s

Thrust

18,000 newtons

Initial Acceleration

1.68 milli-g

Payload

172,000 kg

Length

240 m

Diameter

60 m wide

This design for a fusion propulsion spacecraft is from the NASA report TM-2005-213559 by Craig H. Williams, Leonard A. Dudzinski, Stanley K. Borowski, and Albert J. Juhasz of the Glenn Research Center (2005). The goal was to produce a modern design for the spacecraft Discovery from the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. The report has all sorts of interesting details about where the movie spacecraft design was correct, and the spots where things were altered in the name of cinematography. The movie ship had no heat radiators, and the diameter of the centrifuge was too small. Arthur C. Clark was well aware of this, but was overruled by the movie people.

Magnetic nozzle.

Magnetic nozzle details.

Exacting Class Starfighter

Exacting Class Starfighter

ΔV

7,000,000 m/s(0.02c)

Specific Power

450 MW/kg(450,000,000 W/kg)

Thrust power

9 terawatts

Propulsion

ICF Fusion

Thrust

3,000,000 newtons

Exhaust velocity

6,000,000 m/s

Dry Mass

20 metric tons

Wet Mass

40 to 65 metric tonsdepending upon fuel

Length

60 meters

Width(Whipple shield)

5 meters

Width(Internal hull)

4 meters

Heat radiatorwidth(deployed)

30 meters

Heat radiatorwidth(collapsed)

5 meters

Power plant

50 MW Braydon-cyclew/argon working fluid

Armament

UV laser (3 turrets)MissilesSpinal coilgun (2)Exhaust plume

This is a design by Artist Zach Hajj (a.k.a. Zerraspace), which I found astonishingly good. Personally I cannot find anything scientifically inaccurate with it. The artist mentioned that he used this website as a resource, and I'd say he did his homework.

The structural components of the spacecraft are composed of high-emissivity graffold (folded graphene) scaffolding. The skin is armored with low absorptivity + high emissivity alloy for anti-laser armor, and a Whipple shield to defend against kinetic attacks. For sensors it has frontal and rear IR batteries and several antennae incorporated into the skin.

This is a departure from my regular work towards something more speculative; a true “spacefighter”, a small vessel capable of operating both in space and in an atmosphere. Each one of these is an enormously demanding task on its own, hence the hybrid craft must make a number of compromises to fully operate.

A military vessel first and foremost, the starfighter is not a comfortable ride. Variable thrust and gravity will send the pilot rocking, which the gyroscopic cockpit can only do so much to accommodate, and it has no life support, so he must remain in his space suit at all times. The craft is not meant to hold him for more than a few hours — ideally it is only operated from carriers or planetary bases during skirmishes. That being said, the frontal module can be ejected in case of an emergency, at which solar panels unfurl to provide enough power to operate antenna and coordinate a rescue mission. The starfighter’s minimal design lends to easy conversion to a drone or smart-ship, as this only requires putting a decent computer in place of the cockpit.

In battle, the starfighter serves chiefly as an interceptor or assault craft. As an interceptor, it shoots down incoming missiles and directs fire away from more vital ships. When on the attack, the onboard lasers might not be powerful enough to do significant damage to larger ships, but equipped nukes allow it take down a limited number of opponents of any size. Some militaries even prefer them to capital ships, as many can be built for the same cost as a larger vessel and each loss is less of a hit to the fleet, yet in their numbers they are harder to take down.

Firstly, I set up the ship so as to handle a continuous 24 hours of 5 G acceleration with a mass ratio of 2 when exhaust velocity is 2% c (maximum delta-v 1.5% c), which is probably well beyond how it'll generally operate. I figured it could moderate exhaust velocity by only partially igniting the fuel, letting it get that incredible thrust when needed. If helium-3 fuel is used at maximum exhaust velocity, delta-v is tripled, but then power limits acceleration to 1.5 G at most.

Second, the radiators are deliberately shaped to form a delta-wing when fully unfolded, as NASA pages I found on the matter suggested this was best suited for supersonic flight, and the flaps and slats on the side are used to increase lift at lower speeds where this configuration doesn't work so well. The radiators are also used as an aerobrake while landing, and directly dispose of much of the heat built up.

Lastly, the length required for the coilguns made me think they would have to be stationary mounts, making them somewhat less useful than the ship's missile and laser retinues, so they'd likely more often be used for accelerating missiles than as weapons in their own right. To help compensate, they're open on both ends. When the coilguns are to fire backwards, the projectile is moved to the front end, then accelerated back along the full length, letting it be used both ways.

First Men to the Moon

Artwork by Fred Freeman

This design is from a book called First Men to the Moon (1958) written by a certain Wernher von Braun, aka "The Father of Rocket Science" and the first director of NASA. The book came out shortly after the Sputnik Crisis.

During lift-off and trans-Lunar injection stages one and two have all their fuel burn and the stages are discarded. Part of stage three's fuel is burnt to finalize injection. The rest of stage three's fuel is expended to decelerate and land on Luna. Stage four lifts off from Luna and stage five aerobrakes and lands much like the Space Shuttle.Artwork by Fred Freeman

Spacecraft is powered by storage batteries located under forward astronaut's seat. Batteries are recharged by the nuclear reactor in the ship's nose. In case of reactor failure, batteries can be charged by the banks of solar cells on the hull (which can supply about 10% of the power the reactor can generate).Note the adorable little toilet in the lower left corner of the pressurized cabin, under the astrodome.Note ultraviolet light and smoke pot above second astronaut's chair, this helps locate hull breeches.The temperature control shutters are black on one side, reflective on th other. If internal temperature is too cold, the black side is exposed, and vice versa.Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image

The red girder is the track/support beam that the seat swiveled trolley runs on. Seats are in the "aircraft" configuration.Note TV screen in roof.Food cooker is the box on the wall behind floating astronaut's left thigh.Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image

The red girder is the track/support beam that the seat swiveled trolley runs on. Seats are in the "sitting on its tail" configuration.In "aircraft" configuration, the windows at upper right are overhead.The TV screen shows Wernher's daughter. TV screen is in the roof in "aircraft" configuration, it is noted in the cross-section view in prior illustration.Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image

Seats are in the "sitting on its tail" configuration. Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image

The red girder is the track/support beam that the seat swiveled trolley runs on. Seats are in the "aircraft" configuration. Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image

Meteor strike!Seam tubes are inflated to tighten suit and oxygen masks are on.Breech equipment turns on an ultraviolet lamp and emits florescent smoke. The smoke swirls to indicate location of hull breech.Note Navigator's theodolite in background.Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image

Astronaut is standing on the track/support beam. Artwork by Fred Freeman.

Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image

Artwork by Fred Freeman.

Artwork by Fred Freeman.

Artwork by Fred Freeman.

Cooker is located on the wall behind second astronaut's chair. Artwork by Fred Freeman.

Artwork by Fred Freeman.

Note location of airlock, and the contained cable, reel and hoist. Artwork by Fred Freeman

Note hoist to the left of airlock door.Note reel to right of astronaut's hip.Note handgrip bar above airlock door.Illustration makes interior of airlock look larger than it really is. Artwork by Fred Freeman

Rod with disks at the base of rocket is the automatic landing engine cut-off. The disks are because the consistency of the lunar surface was unknown.Artwork by Fred Freeman

Partial-pressure suit worn inside spacecraft. In case of a hull breech, the pressure regulating tubes in the seam will inflate to put the suit under tension, and the astronaut will put on the emergency oxygen mask.Artwork by Fred Freeman

The full blown space suit for exploring the moon. This is worn over the partial-pressure suit.Artwork by Fred Freeman

There are problems with attempting to confine ionized plasma in a reaction chamber long enough for most of it to undergo nuclear fusion. In the Gasdynamic Mirror propulsion system, they attempt to avoid that by making the reaction chamber a long and skinny tube, so the plasma just travels in a straight line. The trouble is that it has to be really long.

GCNR Liberty Ship

RocketCat sez

Ho, ho! This brute kicks butt and takes names! You want to boost massive amounts of payload into orbit? Freaking monster rocket has eight times the payload of a Saturn V rocket. It can haul three entire International Space Stations into LEO all at once!

But to do this it packs seven honest-to-Heinlein nuclear lightbulb engines! The only rocket that could come close to this beast is a full blown Orion drive rising on a stream of nuclear explosions at about one Hertz.

Anthony Tate has an interesting solution to the heavy lift problem, lofting massive payloads from the surface of Terra into low Earth orbit. In his essay, he says that if we can grow up and stop panicking when we hear the N-word a reusableclosed-cycle gas-core nuclear thermal rocket can boost huge amounts of payload into orbit. He calls it a "Liberty Ship." His design has a cluster of seven nuclear engines, with 1,200,000 pounds of thrust (5,340,000 newtons) each, from a thermal output of approximately 80 gigawatts. Exhaust velocity of 30,000 meters per second, which is a specific impulse of about 3060 seconds. Thrust to weight ratio of 10. Engine with safety systems, fuel storage, etc. masses 120,000 pounds or 60 short tons (54 metric tons ).

Using a Saturn V rocket as a template, the Liberty Ship has a wet mass of six million pounds (2,700,000 kilograms). Mr. Tate designs a delta V of 15 km/s, so it can has powered descent. It can take off and land. This implies a propellant mass of 2,400,000 pounds (1,100,000 kilograms). Using liquid hydrogen as propellant, this will make the propellant volume 15,200 cubic meters, since hydrogen is inconveniently non-dense. Say 20 meters in diameter and 55 meters long. It will be plump compared to a Saturn V.

Design height of 105 meters: 15 meters to the engines, 55 meters for the hydrogen tank, 5 meters for shielding and crew space, and a modular cargo area which is 30 meters high and 20 meters in diameter (enough cargo space for a good sized office building).

A Saturn V has a dry mass of 414,000 pounds (188,000 kilograms).

The Liberty Ship has seven engines at 120,000 pounds each, for a total of 840,000 pounds. Mr. Tate splurges and gives it a structural mass of 760,000 pounds, so it has plenty of surplus strength and redundancy. Add 2,400,000 pounds for reaction mass, and the Liberty Ship has a non-payload wet mass of 4,000,000 pounds.

Since it is scaled as a Saturn V, it is intended to have a total mass of 6,000,000 pounds. Subtract the 4,000,000 pound non-payload wet mass, and we discover that this brute can boost into low earth orbit a payload of Two Million Pounds. Great galloping galaxies! That's about 1000 metric tons, or eight times the boost of the Saturn V.

The Space Shuttle can only boost about 25 metric tons into LEO. The Liberty Ship could carry three International Space Stations into orbit in one trip.

Having said all this, it is important to keep in mind that a closed-cycle gas-core nuclear thermal rocket is a hideously difficult engineering feat, and we are nowhere near possessing the abilty to make one. An open-cycle gas-core rocket is much easier, but there is no way it would be allowed as a surface to orbit vehicle. Spray charges of fissioning radioactive plutonium death out the exhaust nozzle at fifty kilometers per second? That's not a lift off rocket, that's a weapon of mass destruction.

HELIOS stands for Heteropowered Earth-Launched Inter-Orbital Spacecraft. Unfortunately "HELIOS" became a catch-all term for quite a few post-Saturn studies around 1963. This entry is about the 1959 version from Krafft Ehricke at Convair.

As you should recall, when dealing with a radioactive propulsion system the three anti-radiation protection methods are Time, Distance, and Shielding. A rocket cannot shorten the time, a burn for specific amount of delta V takes as long as it takes. Most designs use shielding, even though the regrettable density of shielding savagely cuts into payload mass.

But some designers wondered if distance could be substituted. The advantage is that distance has no mass. The disadvantage is it makes the spacecraft design quite unwieldy. You'd have to either put the propulsion system far behind the habitat module on a long boom, or more alarmingly have the propulsion system in front with the habitat module trailing on a cable. In theory the exhaust plume is not radioactive, so in theory the habitat module can survive being hosed like that.

There is no way this design would work as a warship. It would be like trying to run through a maze while carrying a ladder.

The break-even point is where the mass of the boom or cable is equal to the mass of the shadow shield.

Dr. Ehricke design was two-staged. It has a liftoff mass of 800 metric tons, a diameter of 6 meters (omitting the delta wings) and a length of 60 meters.

The first stage was chemical powered since even in 1959 they knew nobody was going to allow a nuclear propulsion system to lift off from the ground. The lower stage has a delta wing, and will glide back to base after stage separation to be reused on future missions. The lower stage has a diameter of 6 meters, and a wingspan of 27 meters. Wet mass of 700 metric tons, dry mass of 32 metric tons, twin chemical engines with a combined thrust of 12,000,000 newtons. The first stage pilot rides in a little red break-away rocket in case the first stage has an accident.

The first stage separates from the second at an altitude of about 50 kilometers when the velocity reaches 4.5 km/s. The corrugated coupler that held the two stages together falls away.

The second stage will use retrorockets to lower the habitat module on cables about 300 meters below the nuclear stage, then let'er rip. The second stage has a wet mass of 100 metric tons, the nuclear reactor has a power of 2,600 Megawatts, and a thrust of 981,000 newtons. Initial acceleration is 1 g.

When it comes to Lunar landing, the habitat module touches down, then the nuclear stage move down and sideways so it stays 300 meters away as it lands. HELIOS can deliver about 6.8 metric tons of payload to the Lunar surface, and stil carry enough propellant to make it back to LEO.

Dr. Ehricke does not give details above the return trip, but it would need to involve some sort of ferry rocket to retrieve the crew from Terra orbit. There is no way anybody would allow that radioactive doom rocket to actually land. Even if it could carry enough propellant. Dr. Ehricke Convair Space Shuttle would do nicely to retrieve the crew.

Nowadays most experts agree that a 300 meter separation from a 2,600 MW reactor is totally inadequate to protect the astronauts from a horrible radioactive death. I've heard estimates of a minimum 1,000 meter separation from a 1 MW reactor. For 2,600 MW you'd want a separation more like 14,000 meters, which probably has more mass than a conventional radiation shadow shield.

This is for a hypothetical mission to the Jovian moon Callisto. There are three spacecraft: a one-way tanker, a one-way cargo ship, and a round-trip manned ship. Note the manned ship uses an inflatable TransHab for the habitat module.

The Jovian moon Calllisto was choosen as a destination because it is outside of Jupiter's radiation belts, and it has water ice on the surface for propellant production. The purpose of the mission was to establish an outpost and propellant production facility near the Asgard impact site on Callisto. The In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) propellant processing plant will turn water ice into oxygen and hydrogen fuel for the lander. It and the surface habitat will be powered by a 250 kW nuclear reactor. The plant can produce enough fuel for one lander sortie mission between the base and the orbiting ship every 30 days.

The cargo vehicle is unmanned. It transports to Callisto a reusable crew lander, a surface habitat, and the ISRU propellant processing plant.The tanker is unmanned. It transports to Callisto orbit propellant tanks full of propellant the manned ship will need for the trip back to Terra. Both will be dispatched on a slow low-energy trajectory to Calliso.

Only after the unmanned vessels arrive at Callisto (especially the tanker) will the Piloted Callisto Transfer Vehicle (PCTV) be dispatched. It will arrive with most of its propellant expended. It will replenish its propellant from the tanker. The crew will explore Callisto for 120 days, then depart back home to Terra.

Several spacecraft were designed for the mission, each around a different propulsion system for comparision purposes.

HOPE (MPD)

This HOPE spacecraft was designed using Magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP).
The habitat module is surrounded by tanks for radiation shielding. The tail radiators are cut in a triangular shape, and the outer heat radiators are arc shaped to keep them inside the shadow shield's radiation free zone, to prevent them from scattering radiation into the ship.

HOPE Cargo vehicle

HOPE Cargo vehicle

ΔV

20,600 m/s

Specific Power

2 W/kg

Thrust Power

430 kW

Propulsion

MPD thrusters

Specific Impulse

8,000 s

Exhaust Velocity

78,500 m/s

Wet Mass

242,000 kg

Dry Mass

182,000 kg

Mass Ratio

1.3

Mass Flow

1.4 x 10-4 kg/s

Thrust

11 n

Initial Acceleration

4.6 x 10-6 g

Payload

120,000 kg

Length

130 m

Diameter

55 m

HOPE Tanker

HOPE Tanker

ΔV

20,600 m/s

Specific Power

2 W/kg

Thrust Power

430 kW

Propulsion

MPD thrusters

Specific Impulse

8,000 s

Exhaust Velocity

78,500 m/s

Wet Mass

244,000 kg

Dry Mass

184,000 kg

Mass Ratio

1.3

Mass Flow

1.4 x 10-4 kg/s

Thrust

11 n

Initial Acceleration

4.6 x 10-6 g

Payload

103,000 kg

Length

135 m

Diameter

55

HOPE Crew vehicle

Piloted Callisto Transfer Vehicle

ΔV

26,400 m/s

Specific Power

6 W/kg

Thrust Power

1.5 MW

Propulsion

MPD thrusters

Specific Impulse

8,000 s

Exhaust Velocity

78,500 m/s

Wet Mass

262,000 kg

Dry Mass

188,000 kg

Mass Ratio

1.4

Mass Flow

3.6 x 10-4 kg/s

Thrust

28 n

Initial Acceleration

1.1 x 10-5 g

Payload

79,000 kg

Length

117 m

Diameter

52 m

Version 1. MPD thrusters on cross bar

Version 1. MPD thrusters on cross bar

Version 2. MPD thrusters on tail.

Version 2. MPD thrusters on tail.

Comparison with MPD HOPE and FFRE HOPE. MPD wins due to shorter mission duration. FFRE has lower mass due to higher Isp, but lower acceleration make higher mission duration.

Comparison with MPD HOPE and FFRE HOPE. MPD wins due to shorter mission duration. FFRE has lower mass due to higher Isp, but lower acceleration make higher mission duration.

Stuhlinger Ion Rocket

Stuhlinger Ion Rocket

Length

150 m

Wet mass

360 metric tons

Dry mass

Lander ship: 240 metric tonsCargo ship:170 metric tons

CesiumPropellant

Lander ship: 120 metric tonsCargo ship: 190 metric tons

Mass ofMars Lander

70 metric ton

Storm cellarmass

50 metric tons

Storm cellarheight

1.9 m

Storm cellardiameter

2.8

Crew

3

Rotation rate

1.3 rpm

Artificialgravity

0.14 g

Reactorthermalpower

115 MWt

Generatorpower

40 MWe

Radiatorarea

4,300 m2

Radiatordissipation

75 MWt

Propulsion

Ion

thrust

98 N

Note the similarity to this 1962 Ernst Stuhlinger design for a Mars ion-drive rocket. In the mission plan, the expedition would have three spacecraft carrying a Mars lander, and two without. The astronauts would live in the storm cellars for the 20 days it would take to pass through the Van Allen radiation belts. Earth-to-Mars transfer would span mission days 57 through 204. On day 130 the thrust would be changed 180°, brachistochrone style.

From Citizens of the Sky by Robert Parkinson (1987). Artwork by Robert Parkinson

There is significant debate in the advanced propulsion
community with respect to the complexity of the engineering challenges associated with the VASIMR system and
hence for the purposes of the HOPE study, VASIMR was viewed at a lower state of TRL than MPD thrusters.

VASIMR performance potential was utilized in this option to improve upon the previous option. A single VASIMR
propelled vehicle is used to transport the surface systems and return propellant to Callisto as opposed to two. As in
the previous scenarios, the tanked/cargo vehicle remains in orbit around Callisto to be used a future propellant depot.

The piloted VASIMR vehicle was fitted with a second TransHab and configured with its main tanks clustered
around the rotation axis. The two TransHabs balance each other and are connected by a pressurized tunnel so that
the crew can move between them. Like the previous option, there are hydrogen tanks protecting the crew but they
do not begin to empty till the last few months of the return mission. The resulting configuration reduces risk by
having two crew habitats, the ability to generate artificial gravity throughout the entire mission plus significantly
improved radiation protection.

The down side is that the payload masses have gone up due to combining the cargo
and tanker vehicles and the piloted vehicle enhancements. The 10 MW that was used for the MPD option is not
enough power for the VASIMR option to meet mission requirements. The VASIMR option does close assuming 30
MW on each vehicle resulting in a piloted mission round trip time of around 4.9 years with 32 days at Callisto. The
total mission mass is between the previous two options with the benefits of increased safety and robustness.

Fuel pellets have 3.0 grams of nuclear fuel (molar ratio of 9:1 of Deuterium:Uranium 235) coated with a spherical shell of 200 grams of lead. The lead shell is to convert the high energy radiation into a form more suited to be absorbed by the propellant. Each pellet produces 302 gigajoules of energy (about 72 tons of TNT) and are fired off at a rate of 1 Hz (one per second). The pellet explodes when it is struck by a beam containing about 1×1011 antiprotons.

A sector of a spherical shell of 4 meters radius is centered on the pellet detonation point. The shell is the solid propellant, silicon carbide (SiC), ablative propellant. The missing part of the shell constitutes the exhaust nozzle. Each fuel pellet detonation vaporizes 0.8 kilograms of propellant from the interior of the shell, which shoots out the exhaust port at 132,000 meters per second. This produces a thrust of 106,000 newtons.

The Penn State ICAN-II spacecraft was to have an ACMF engine, a delta-V capacity of 100,000 m/s, and a dry mass of 345 metric tons. The delta-V and exhaust velocity implied a mass ratio of 2.05. The dry mass and the mass ratio implied that the silicon carbide propellant shell has a mass of 362 metric tons. The wet mass and the thrust implied an acceleration of 0.15 m/s2 or about 0.015g. It can boost to a velocity of 25 km/sec in about three days. At 0.8 kilograms propellant ablated per fuel pellet, it would require about 453,000 pellets to ablat the entire propellant shell.

It carries 65 nanograms of antiprotons in the storage ring. At about 7×1014 antiprotons per nanogram, and 1×1011 antiprotons needed to ignite one fuel pellet, that's enough to ignite about 453,000 fuel pellets.

Kuck Mosquito

RocketCat sez

This thing looks really stupid, but it could be the key to opening up the entire freaking solar system. Orbital propellant depots will make space travel affordable, and these water Mosquitos are just the thing to keep the depots topped off.

They arrive at the target body and use thermal lances to anchor themselves. They drill through the rocky outer layer, inject steam to melt the ice, and suck out the water. The drill can cope with rocky layers of 20 meters or less of thickness.

When the 1,000 cubic meter collection bag is full, some of the water is electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen fuel for the rocket engine (in an ideal world the bag would only have to be 350 cubic meters, but the water is going to have lots of mud, cuttings, and other non-water debris).

The 5,600 m/s delta-V is enough to travel between the surface of Deimos and LEO in 270 days, either way. 250 metric tons of H2-O2 fuel, 100 metric tons of water payload, about 0.3 metric tons of drills and pumping equipment, and an unknown amount of mass for the chemical motor and power source (probably solar cells or an RTG).

100 metric tons of water in LEO is like money in the bank. Water is one of the most useful substance in space. And even though it is coming 227,000,000 kilometers from Deimo instead of 160 kilometers from Terra, it is a heck of a lot cheaper.

Naturally pressuring the interior of an asteroid with live steam runs the risk of catastrophic fracture or explosion, but that's why this is being done by a robot instead of by human beings.

In the first image, ignore the "40 tonne water bag" label. That image is from a wargame where 40 metric tons was the arbitrary modular tank size.

Inspired by a post by Retro Rockets I took a look at the classic spaceship Luna from the movie Destination Moon (1950). With Robert Heinlien as technical consultant, this movie was the most scientifically acurate one since Frau im Mond (1929). It held the throne for 18 years, until it was supplanted by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

For the specifications I used data from Spaceship Handbook and the Retro Rockets article. I then massaged the figures until they were internally consistent.

Spaceship Handbook calculated that a round trip mission to the surface of Luna would take about 16,480 m/s of delta V. So that's our performance limit for the mission. In addition, it will have to have a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than 1.0, since it has to lift off from Terra's surface. The movie specifies 5 gs, which translates to 11,000,000 newtons.

The movie specified that the reaction mass was water, not liquid hydrogen. While this does simplify the tankage, it does cut the exhaust velocity/specific impulse in half.

A solid-core nuclear thermal rocket engine is not going to be able to crank out enough delta V, not at the specifed mass-ratio it ain't. But the liquid-core Liquid Annular Reactor System (LARS) will do nicely. It can jet out liquid-hydrogen propellant at 20,000 m/s or better, so it can probably manage to hurl water at 10,300 m/s. That will give the Luna a delta-V of 16,600 m/s, just a tad larger than the required 16,480 m/s for the Lunar mission. More than enough, assuming you don't waste a lot of delta V during the landing.

The movie says the structural mass is 27 metric tons, which makes it 60% of dry mass. Nowadays NASA vessels typically have a structural mass of 21.7% of structual mass. 60% is a bit extravagant but believable with 1950's technology. If you made the structure NASA-light, you could add about 17 metric tons to the payload. The payload is the crew, equipment, life support, acceleration couches, and controls.

These two designs are from The Resources of the Solar System by Dr. R. C. Parkinson (Spaceflight, 17, p.124 (1975)). The Lighter ferries tanks of liquid hydrogen from an electrolyzing station on Callisto into orbit where waits the Tanker. Once the Tanker has a full load of tanks it transports them to LEO. All the ships are drones or robot controlled, there are no humans aboard. The paper makes a good case that shipping hydrogen from Callisto to LEO would eventually be more economically effective than shipping from the surface of Terra to LEO, with the break-even point occurring at 7.8 years. Please note that this study was done in 1975, before the Lunar polar ice was discovered, and probably before the ice of Deimos was suspected.

Warning: most of the figures in the table are my extrapolations from the scanty data in the report. Figures in yellow are sort of in the report. Use at your own risk.

The tanker uses a freaking open-cycle gas-core nuclear thermal rocket. This is an incredibly powerful true atomic rocket, but it is only fractionally more environmentally safe that an Orion nuclear bomb rocket. The report says it should be possible to design it so the amount of deadly fissioning uranium escaping out the exhaust is kept down to as low as one part per 350 of the propellant flow (about 300 grams per second), but I'll believe it when I see it. Since it is used only in deep space we can allow it, this time. The report gives it an exhaust velocity of 35,000 m/s, which is about midway to the theoretical maximum.

The lighter can get by with a more conventional hydrogen-oxygen chemical rocket. It will need an acceleration greater than Callisto's surface gravity of 1.235 m/s2, for safety make it 1.5x the surface gravity, or about 1.9 m/s (0.6g).

The four major Galilean moons are within Jupiter's lethal radiation belt, except for Callisto. The black monolith from 2010 The Year We Make Contact only told us puny humans to stay away from Europa, so Callisto is allowed. If you want ice that isn't radioactive, you've come to the right place. It is almost 50% ice, and remember this is a moon the size of planet Mercury. That's enough ice to supply propellant to the rest of the solar system for the next million years or so. Europa has more, but it is so deep in the radiation belt it glows blue. Callisto is also conveniently positioned for a gravitational sling shot maneuver around Jupiter to reduce the delta-V required for the return trip to Terra.

The report says that the requirements for an economically exploitable resource are:

It is not available in the Terra-Luna system

It must provide more of it than the mass originally required to be assembled in Terra orbit at the outset of the expedition

It must be done within a reasonably short time (the break-even time)

Hydrogen fits [1], or at least it did until the Lunar ice was discovered. [2] and [3] depend upon the performance of the vehicle.

There are three parts. First is the Tanker, which is an orbit-to-orbit spacecraft to transport the hydrogen back to LEO and brings the expedition to Callisto in the first place. Next is an electrolysis plant capable of mining ice, melting it into water, cracking it into oxygen and hydrogen, and liquefying the hydrogen. Last is a Lighter which is an airless lander that ferries liquid hydrogen from the plant on Callisto to the orbiting Tanker.

The report decided to use modular cryogenic hydrogen tanks that would fit in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay. They would have to be about 18.3 meters x 4.57 meters, about 300 cubic meters capacity. The report has a filled tank massing at 26,000 kg, with 22,000 kg being liquid hydrogen and 4,000 kg being tank structural mass. Examining the drawing of the tanker, the front cluster is composed of four tanks while the rear has nine, for a total of thirteen. The tanker will have a length of two tanks plus the length of the rocket engine, 37 meters plus rocket. The rear has tanks arranged in a triangular array about four tanks high. So a diameter roughly 18 meters or so.

The lighter carries a single tank, so it is roughly one tank in diameter, and one tank long plus the fuel tanks+engine length. It will need a large enough liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen chemical fuel capacity to lift off from Callisto to the tanker and land back on Callisto.

The report figures that the electrolysis plant can produce hydrogen for about 39 kW-h/kg, that is, each kilogram of hydrogen in the plant requires 39 kilowatt-hours. Figure it needs more electricity to liquefy the hydrogen, and more to produce the liquid oxygen needed by the lighter, for a total cost of 50 kW-hr/kg for liquid hydrogen delivered to the orbiting tanker. So a 2 megawatt nuclear reactor could produce 350 metric tons of hydrogen per year. Launch windows back to Terra occur every 398.9 days.

Once the lighter has made enough trip to fully load the tanker, the tanker departs for LEO. It will use some of the hydrogen for propellant, some will be the payload off-loaded at LEO, and enough will be left to return the tanker to Callisto. The amount of payload is specified to have a mass equal to 37% of the fully loaded mass of the tanker. It also specifies that the inert mass fraction of the tanker is 25% of the tankers fully loaded mass.

The report had an esoteric equation that calculated the mass of the lighter and electrolysis plant as a percentage of the tanker mass in order to be economically viable. It turns out to be 13% of the fully loaded mass of the tanker. When the expedition is launched the tanker will carry the lighter, the electrolysis plant, and enough propellant so that the total mass is 52.9% of the fully loaded mass (i.e., it departs half empty). The lighter will have its tanks full.

Five years later, upon arrival at Callisto, the lighter lands the electrolysis plant on a prime patch of ice. It then starts the cycle: patiently waiting for the plant to fill the payload tank and the fuel tanks, boost the payload to the tanker, then land back at the plant to start again.

In context: this was one of a series or articles I wrote for Spaceflight
at the encouragement of the then editor, Ken Gatland, triggered off in
the dark days following abandonment of the Apollo programme by a
discussion at the BIS as to what would be needed to make spaceflight
self-supporting. The first article was published in Spaceflight 1974
p.322 under the title "Take-Off Point for a Lunar Colony." There was
then a second on "The Colonization of Space" (S/F 1975 p.88) and a
couple of subsequent ones on Lunar Colonies (S/F 1977 p.42/103). Later,
when they invented the first spreadsheets, I did some speculation on how
the economics of everything might fit together economically in a big
input-output model which got published as "The Space Economy of 2050 AD"
in JBIS v.44, p.111 (1991) which also appeared in my book Citizens of
the Sky (1989) later. It is unlikely that I was consistent through all of
this — my opinions develop with time — and by the 1991 period I was
heavily in to the economics or reusable launchers and what would happen
if the models were pushed to very high flight rates.

Going back to "The Resources of the Solar System", I'm not sure how much
detail I managed at the time. I remember that there were a couple of
things influencing me at the time. One was the concept of a gas core
nuclear engine (GCR) which might have a specific impulse of about 3500
sec (35 km/s). To really move around the Solar System you need a high
thrust-to-mass engine with this sort of specific impulse, and GCR had
the interesting property of using hydrogen as propellant. (Ion motors
can meet the specific impulse, but to do a similar job would require a
power-mass ratio several orders better than anything we could consider
then or even today — VASIMIR suffers the same problem). Nowadays I might
put my money more on a pulsed-fusion system (see “Using Daedalus for
Local Transport,” JBIS, 62, p. 422-426 (2009)) — note NOT using
helium-3, which would change the model significantly.

The second thing at the time that influenced me — at a time when the
Space Shuttle was still a paper vehicle — was that the Space Shuttle
payload bay was just about the right size (15 ft × 60 ft) to carry a
full liquid hydrogen tank (there are reasons now why it wouldn't which
led to the abandonment of design work using Centaur as an upper stage) —
so my modular design was based around using that as a standard tank.
For use in long duration space missions the tank would have to have some
sort of active cooling system to keep the hydrogen from boiling away,
but given that you could then ship LH2 around the Solar System on slow,
economical trajectories like modern oil tankers on Earth. Once you have
rerfuelling stations at either end interplanetary flight becomes a lot
easier and you can think of using higher speed trajectories for special
cargo like human beings.

From personal email from Dr. Parkinson (2014)

All the other figures in the table are ones I've extrapolated from the few figures given in the report.

A plausible figure for nuclear power generation is 0.12 Megawatts per ton of generator. This would make the electrolysis 2 MW power reactor have a mass of 16,000. This is close to the 25,000 kg mass of a payload tank. So to simplify, assume the electrolysis rig with liquefaction gear and all masses a total of 25,000. This also ensures that the lighter is capable of landing it.

The tanker's inert mass fraction is 25%, and hydrogen payload is 37%. This means the dry mass is 62%, which means the mass ratio is 1.61. With an exhaust velocity of 35,000 m/s, this yields a total delta-V of 16,730 m/s. I am unsure if this is enough for a Callisto orbit-LEO mission followed by a LEO-Callisto orbit mission. Not without a heck of a gravitational sling-shot it isn't. Or I could have made a mistake in math.

Note both the payload and the propellant is hydrogen, stored in the same array of tanks. If the inert mass fraction is 25%, then the payload+propellant mass fraction is 75%. If there are 13 tanks each of 25,000 kg, then the total is 325,000 kg. If this is 75% of the wet mass, the actual wet mass is 433,000 kg. If the payload is 37% of the wet mass, it is 160,000 kg. If a hydrogen tank is 87% hydrogen and 13% tankage, the amount of hydrogen payload is 139,000 kg.

On the initial trip, the tanker carries the electrolysis plant and the lighter (with no payload, but with full fuel tanks). This is 13% of the wet mass or 56,300 kg. If the electrolysis plant is 25,000 kg, the lighter (with no payload) must be 31,290 kg. The lighter payload is one payload tank at 25,000 kg. So the lighter wet mass is 56,290 kg.

The lighter needs a delta-V of 3,414 m/s (Callisto-surface-to-orbit + orbit-to-Callisto-surface). Chemical fuel has exhaust velocity of 4,410 m/s. This means the mass ratio has to be 2.17. This implies the dry mass is 25,898 kg. Subtract the 25,000 kg payload, and there is 898 kg for the structure and the engine. Seems a little flimsy to me, perhaps 25,000 kg is a bit to generous for the payload tank.

Tanker and lighter. Artwork by Dr. R. C. Parkinson

Tanker. Artwork by Dr. R. C. Parkinson

Tank. Artwork by Dr. R. C. Parkinson

Tank is scaled to fit in Space Shuttle cargo bay. At least the the proposed size of the bay in 1975 when the report was written, it was later reduced in size.

Lighter rendezvous with tanker above Callisto, carrying a freshly filled tank full of Callistonian hydrogen. An electrolyzing station on Callisto cracks water ice into oxygen and hydrogen. Artwork by Dr. R. C. Parkinson

Mars Expedition Spacecraft

This is from a NASA Manned Spaceflight Center (renamed the Johnson Space Center in 1973). The study was done in 1963. I have not been able to find lots of hard details, but there is some information in David Portree's monograph Humans to Mars on pages 15 to 18, available here.

It travels in a Hohmann transfer to Mars, separated into two parts spinning like a bola for artificial gravity. In Mars orbit, the heat shield, laboratory, and rendezvous ship separate and land. After a forty day stay, the astronauts use the rendezvous ship to climb back into orbit and travel to the mother ship. After the journey back to Terra, the astronauts land via the re-entry module.

From The Dream Machines by Ron Miller. Note how it separates and spins like a bola for artificial gravity.

From The Dream Machines by Ron Miller

Mars Umbrella Ship

RocketCat sez

There is just something about this surreal design that gets to you. People who briefly saw the deep space umbrella in 1957 still remember it. Totally unlike any other spacecraft you've ever seen. That is, except for science fiction ships from artist who also were haunted by the blasted thing.

Not a bad ship either. Except that pathetic one-lung ion drive is so weak that it takes a third of a year to reach orbit halfway between Terra and Luna. I'm sure we can do better than that today. Swap it out for a VASIMR or something and you'll have a ship that can go places and do things!

artwork by Winchell Chung (me)

Umbrella Ship

ΔV

55,000 m/s

Specific Power

60 W/kg

Thrust Power

19.6 megawatts

Propulsion

Ion

Specific Impulse

8,200 s

Exhaust Velocity

80,000 m/s

Wet Mass

660,000 kg(730,000 kg)

Dry Mass

328,000 kg

Mass Ratio

2.0

Thrust

490 Newtons

Initial Acceleration

7.6×10-5 g(6.7×10-5 g)

Payload

136,000 kg(150,000 kg)

Crew size

20

Length

102 m

Diameter

152 m

Hab ring Dia

39 m

Unusual spacecraft designed by Ernst Stuhlinger in 1957, based on a US Army Ballistic Missile Agency study. It made an appearance in a Walt Disney presentation "Mars and Beyond". 4 December 1957. David S. F. Portree, noted space history researcher and author of Wired's Beyond Apollo blog, managed to uncover the identity of Dr. Stuhlinger's report for me, it is NASA TMX-57089 Electrical Propulsion System for Space Ships with Nuclear Power Source by Ernst Stuhlinger, 1 July 1955. Thanks, David!

The spacecraft resembled a huge umbrella, with the parasol part being an enormous heat radiator.

Diagram from TMX-57089

At the very bottom is a 100 megawatt (thermal power) fast neutron nuclear reactor, mounted on a 100 meter boom to reduce the radiation impact on the crew habitat. A fast neutron reactor design was chosen because they can be built will a smaller mass and smaller size (reducing the size of the shadow shield). The reactor is capped with a shadow shield broad enough to cast a shadow over the entire heat radiator array. The part of the shadow shield closest to the reactor is 1.8 meters of beryllium. This stops most of the gamma rays, and slows down the neutrons enough that they can be stopped by an outer layer of boron. The shadow shield has a mass of 30 metric tons, and coupled with the boom distance it reduces the radiation flux at the habitat ring to 10 fast neutrons per second per cm2 and 100 gamma rays per second per cm2.

The liquid sodium will be carried in pipes constructed of molybdenum. The reactor will have a specific power around 0.1 kW per kg. It contains 0.6 cubic meters of uranium enriched 1.7%, and has a mass of 12 metric tons. No moderator or reflector is required. "Cool" liquid sodium (500° C) enters the reactor and leaves the reactor hot (800° C) at the rate of 300 kg/sec. The reactor contains 600 molybdenum pipes with an inner diameter of 1.8 cm and a length of 1 meter. Electromagnetic pumps move the liquid sodium, since it is metallic. Such pumps are used since the only way to make pumps that will operate continuously for over a year with high reliability is to have no moving parts. The pumps will consume about 100 kW.

The hot sodium enters the heat exchanger, where it heats up the cool silicon oil working fluid. The now cool liquid sodium goes back to the reactor to complete the cycle. The heat exchanger is used because silicon oil is more convenient as a working fluid, and because the liquid sodium becomes more radioactive with each pass through the reactor. The heat exchanger contains 3000 tubes for liquid sodium, with a total length of 1,800 meters and an inner diameter of 1.3 cm. The silicon oil is boiled into a vapor at 500° C under 20 atmospheres of pressure.

Power plant at the bottom of the boom. Cool silicon oil enters from the top. In the heat exchanger, the silicon oil is heated by the hot liquid sodium. The hot silicon oil leaves by the center pipe, traveling upwards to the turbine. The cooled liquid sodium leaves the heat exchanger, traveling downwards, pulled by electromagnetic pumps. It enters the sides of the nuclear reactor, where it is heated. It then leaves the reactor by the center pipe, traveling back to the heat exchanger. The reactor is capped by a radiation shadow shield, and the entire unit is on the end of a long boom to keep the radiation as far away as possible from the crew habitat ring. Diagram from TMX-57089

Internal details of the nuclear reactor. "Cool" liquid sodium (500° C) enters the reactor from the sides. There it is heated (800° C), and leaves through the pipe in the center. Boron control rods are inserted and removed from the reactor to control the reaction. The reactor is capped by a beryllium radiation shadow shield. The reactor is sheathed in an anti-meteor bumper shield, because a meteor puncturing the reactor would be a very bad thing. Diagram from TMX-57089

The hot oil vapor travels up the boom to a point just below the umbrella. There it runs a turbine which runs a generator creating electricity. The turbine is a low-pressure, multi-stage turbine with a high expansion ratio. Silicon oil was selected since it can carry heat and simultaneously lubricate the turbine, since this has to run continuously for over a year. Silicon oil is also liquid at 10° C, allowing the power plant to be started in space with no preheating equipment. The oil has a specific heat of about 0.4 cal per g per degree C, a heat of vaporization of 100 cal per g, a density of 1 g per cm3. If the umbrella heat radiator is at a temperature of 280° C, this implies that about 100 kg/sec must flow through the turbine. The feed pumps will consume about 200 kW. The total mass of the working fluid in the entire system will be about 8 metric tons.

Newton's third law in the turbine causes the section of the spacecraft from turbine upwards to rotate, including the ring habitat module and the umbrella heat radiator. The spin rate is about 1.5 rotations per minute. The generator is cooled by small square heat radiators mounted on the habitat ring.

The boom below the turbine is counter-rotated so it remains stationary. This is because the boom has the ion engine. If the boom was not counter-rotated, the ion engine would also rotate. The result would be a stationary ship behaving like a merry-go-round, spinning in place while spraying ions everywhere like an electric Catherine wheel.

The hot silicon oil vapor is injected into the central part of the rotating umbrella heat radiator (the radiator feed), and centrifugal force draws it through the radiator. The cooled oil is collected at the rim of the radiator, and pumped back to the reactor to complete the cycle. The rotation of the ring habitat module provides artificial gravity for the crew. The habitat ring is in the central part of the umbrella.

The umbrella heat radiator will have a temperature of 280° C. The silicon oil vapor will be reduced to the low pressure of 0.1 atmosphere, to reduce the required mass of heat radiator. The ship will be oriented so that the umbrella is always edge on to the Sun, for efficiency. The diameter of the umbrella will be about 100 meters, constructed of titanium. The wall thickness is 0.5 mm, the thickness of the disk is 6 cm near the center and 1 cm near the rim. The umbrella is composed of sectors, each with an inlet valve near the center and an outlet valve at the rim. If any sector is punctured by a meteorite, the valve will automatically shut until repairs can be made. The other sectors will have to take up the slack.

artwork by Winchell Chung (me)

(1) Hot silicon oil from reactor enters (2) turbine, spinning it. Turbine spin drives (3) generator, creating electricity for ion drive. (4) Hot silicon leaves turbine and enters (5) radiator feed ring. The ring feeds the hot oil into inner edge of (6) heat radiator, where the oil is drawn through radiator by centrifugal force and cooled. Cool oil enters (7) collector at rim of radiator and is fed into the (8) return pipes and sent to the center. There the cool oil enters the (9) return manifold where all the cool oil is (10) sent back to the reactor to start the cycle again.

Diagram from TMX-57089

The electricity runs an ion drive, mounted on the lower boom at the ship's center of gravity. The ion drive uses cesium as propellant since that element is very easy to ionize. Cesium jets have a purplish-blue color. The umbrella section and the reactor have about the same mass, since the reactor is composed of uranium. The habitat ring has a bit more mass, this is why the ion drive is a bit above the midpoint of the boom.

Cesium has a density of 1930 kilograms per cubic meter. The spacecraft carries 332,000 kilograms of cesium reaction mass. This works out to 172 cubic meters of reaction mass, which would fit in a cube 5.6 meter on a side. Which is about the size of the block in between the ion drive and the landing boat, the one with the boom stuck through it. (ah, as it turns out my deduction was correct, now that I have the original report to read)

However, cesium propellant is now considered obsolete, nowadays ion thrusters instead use inert gases like xenon. Cesium and related propellants are admittedly easy to ionize, but they have a nasty habit of eroding away the ion drive accelerating electrodes. Xenon is inert and far less erosive, it is now the propellant of choice for ion drives.

Cross-section of ion drive. Cesium propellant enters drive via ceramic pipes. It is ionized by the platinum grids in the ion chambers, and emitted as an ion beam. Filaments in the electron chambers between the ion chambers are the charge neutralizers. Diagram from TMX-57089

Mounted opposite the ion drive is the Mars landing boat. It is attached so its center of gravity is along the thrust axis. This ensures that the umbrella ship's center of gravity does not change when the landing boat detaches. The landing boat uses a combination of rockets and parachutes to reach the surface of Mars. The upper half lift off to return to the orbiting umbrella ship.

artwork by Winchell Chung (me)

The habitat ring has an outer radius of 19.5 meters, an inner radius of 15 meters, and a height of 6 meters (according to the blueprints). If I am doing my math properly, this implies an internal volume of 2,900 cubic meters, less the thickness of the walls. At a spin rate of 1.5 rotation per minute, that would give an artificial gravity of about 0.05g.

Above the umbrella and habitat ring is an airlock module containing two "bottle suit" space pods. Above that is a rack of four sounding rockets with instruments to probe the Martian atmosphere. At the top is the large rectangular antenna array.

The spacecraft is much lighter than an equivalent ship using chemical propulsion, and has a jaw-droppingly good mass ratio of 2.0, instead of 5.0 or more. However, the spacecraft's minuscule acceleration is close to making the ship unusable. It takes almost 100 days to reach an orbit only halfway between Terra and Luna. At day 124 it finally breaks free of Terra's gravity and enters Mars transfer orbit. It does not reach Mars capture orbit until day 367, but it takes an additional 45 to lower its orbit enough so that the landing boat can reach Mars. All in all, the umbrella ship takes about 142 days longer than a chemical ship for a Mars mission, due to the low acceleration. Which is bad news if you are trying to minimize the crew's exposure to cosmic radiation and solar proton storms.

The design might be improved by replacing the ion drive with an ion drive with more thrust, or with a magnetoplasmadynamic, VASIMR or other similar drive invented since 1957.

In his paper, Dr. Stuhlinger proposed that the Mars expedition be composed of a fleet of several ships. The Mars exploration equipment would be shared among all the ships. In addition, there would be some "cargo" ships. These would only carry enough propellant for a one-way trip, so they could transport a payload of 300 metric tons instead of 150. They would be manned by a skeleton crew, who would ride back to Terra on other ships.

I am not quite the artist that Nick Stevens is, but I had to try my hand at it. Click to enlarge.

Michael Nuclear Pulse Battleship

RocketCat sez

Oooooh, Yeah!!! The Orion-drive Michael Battleship is the biggest meanest son-of-a-spacer in the cosmos! Well, maybe second to the Project Orion Battleship.

Just look at that bad boy! Can't you just see that unstoppable titan blazing into orbit on a pillar of multiple nuclear explosions, ready to kick that alien bussard ramjet's buns up between its shoulder blades? The drawback to Orion-drive is that it don't scale down worth a darn. So they didn't even try. No "every gram counts" worries here, they freaking chopped the main guns off the freaking Battleship New Jersey and welded them on!

What's that you ask? What about the pumping bomb? Well, this is an Orion-drive, moron. That's whats driving the ship. Spit out a few Excaliburs, they aim their hundreds of laser rods on their targets, then the next pulse unit simultaneously thrusts the ship and energizes the graser beams. Another jumbo-sized order of crispy-fried elephant, coming right up!

Still have megatons of payload allowance left over? Well, how about carrying a small fleet of gunships with nuclear missiles? And all four space shuttles?

The look on the elephant's faces was priceless! Michael is coming. And is he pissed!

Warning: spoilers for the book Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle to follow. On the other hand, the novel came out decades ago in 1985. I mean, in the novel the U.S.S.R. still exists. It takes place in the far flung future year 1995.

Footfall is arguably the best "alien invasion" novel ever written. Just like The Mote in God's Eye is arguably the best "first contact" novel ever written. But I digress.

Aliens (called "Fithp") who look like baby elephants arrive from Alpha Centauri in a Bussard ramjet starship (hybrid Sleeper ship and Generation ship). The starship is named "Message Bearer." They immediately ditch the Bussard drive module into the Sun, destroying it. If the Fithp are defeated, the humans can jolly well build their own Bussard drive from scratch to travel to Alpha C and attack the Fithp homeworld.

The Fithp evolved from herd animals, unlike humans. They have a very alien idea of conflict resolution. When two herds meet, they fight until it was obvious which one was superior. Then everybody immediately stops fighting, and the inferior herd is peacefully incorporated into the superior tribe as second-class citizens. Fithp do not comprehend the concept of "diplomacy".

They make the unwise assumption that human beings operate the same way. Big mistake!

The Fithp have somewhat superior technology compared to humans. They attack and seize the Russian space station (the ISS was not started until 13 years after the novel was written), annihilate military sites and important infrastructure with rods from God, then invade Kansas. The Fithp think "Look, humans. We are obviously superior. Now is the time to stop fighting and be peacefully incorporated into our herd." The Fithp calmly wait for the human surrender.

Humans don't work that way (and they have no idea that the Fithp have such a bizarre way of interacting). They savagely counterattack with the National Guard and three US armored divisions. The Fithp are taken aback, and beat off the counterattack with orbital lasers and more rods from God. The humans respond with a combined Russian and US nuclear strike on Kansas, obliterating the Fithp invasion force and most of the Kansas heartland.

The Fithp start panicking. What is it going to take to make these crazy humans surrender?

Finally the Fithp decide to forgo all half-measures. They drop a small "dinosaur killer" asteroid on Terra. The asteroid is called "The Foot." This causes global environmental damage, and more or less kills everybody living in India. Surely this will make the humans surrender!

The Fithp obviously don't know humans very well.

The humans have their backs to the wall, since surrender is not in their nature. The US president has a tiger team of advisers, who were drawn from the ranks of science fiction authors. After all, they are the only experts on alien invasions (in the novel, the various advisers are thinly disguised versions of actual real-world authors. Nat Reynolds is Larry Niven, Wade Curtis is Jerry Pournelle, and Bob Anson is Robert Anson Heinlein). They have got to find a way to carry the battle to the enemy: the orbiting starship and the fleet of "digit" ships. But how do you get thousands of tons of military hardware into orbit quickly enough not to be shot down while in flight using only technology they can develop in a dozen months?

There is only one answer. Project Orion. Old boom-boom. And to heck with the limited nuclear test-ban treaty that killed the project in 1963.

Orion has already been developed. Orion is mass-insensitive, it doesn't care if you are boosting tens of thousands of metric tons. This also means you can use quick and dirty engineering, since you are not stopping every five minutes trying to shave off a few grams of excess mass. You don't have to spend a decade trying to engineer featherweight kinetic energy weapons, just go tear the gun turrets off the Battleship New Jersey and weld 'em on. You can also carry a fleet of gunboats. And all four space shuttles.

The gunboats are going to be quick and dirty as well. Spaceships built around a main gun off a Navy ship, firing nuclear shells. Yes, a spinal mounted weapon

The weapons are called "spurt bombs." Dispensers on the pusher plate eject a flight of the little darlings. The spurt bombs unfurl their 100 laser rods apiece and aim them at Fithp ships. The next nuclear pulse unit is positioned, then detonated. This simultaneously gives thrust to the spacecraft, and pumps all of the spurts bombs. The Fithp ships are sliced and diced by a hail of x-ray laser beams. Spurt bombs look like fasces, "bundles of tubes around an axis made up of attitude jets and cameras and a computer."

Note that the nuclear pulse units will have to be specially designed. Standard Orion pulse units are nuclear shaped charges, designed to channel 80% of the x-rays upwards into the pusher plate (well, to create a jet of plasma directed at the plate but I digress). The battleship's pulse units need to be designed to also direct x-rays at the spurt bombs.

What is the battleship's name? Michael of course. The Biblical Archangel who cast Lucifer out of heaven.

The Michael launches through a cloud of Fithp digit ships, cutting them to pieces but suffering serious damage. The Fithp defecate in their pants and frantically rip the starship out of orbit and start running away. Their superior acceleration make escape possible, up until the point where the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis commits suicide and rams the starship. The main drive is damaged, and their acceleration is no longer higher than the Michael. Who catches up and starts pounding the living snot out of the starship.

There is something breathtaking about the Michael that captures the imagination of science fiction fans. On pretty much every single online forum about spacecraft combat, it isn't long until somebody brings it up. There have been many examples of fans trying to make blueprints, illustrations, or even scratch-build models of the battleship.

The original Michael diagram was made by Aldo Spadoni, president of Aerospace Imagineering. Mr. Spadoni is an MIT educated mechanical/aerospace engineer with over 30 years of experience designing and developing advanced aerospace vehicle and weapon system concepts (with most of the more advanced work being classified). He is also a personal friend of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Mr. Spadoni did the Michael diagrams around 1997, working directly with Niven and Pournelle. They went through several iterations to arrive at the resulting diagrams.

Aldo Spadoni's Michael

However, this does bring up a good point that Scott alluded to. Footfall is a novel of course, not an engineering proposal for a space battleship. You glean details regarding the various Footfall spacecraft from the conversations of characters in the story, many of which are not experts wrt what they are describing. As Scott also pointed out, there are inconsistencies in the descriptions that are either intentional or simply mistakes on the part of the authors. Thus, the design of the Footfall spacecraft are open to interpretation.

As an engineer and concept designer, I particularly like the way Larry and Jerry write their stories. They provide enough big picture detail to determine the general design direction for their concepts, but leave the smaller details and the system integration issues to anyone willing to take a crack at envisioning their concepts. Fun stuff! So, I think my overall design captures what the authors intended, but many of the details are open to different interpretations, as some of you have done here.

As I move into discussing some of Michael’s details, I want to note that my primary design goal was to be true to the novel and the authors’ intentions as I understood them. I have my own vision of what a space battleship might look like, as I’m sure many of you have. But that’s not the subject of this design exercise.

As did Scott (Lowther), I struggled to determine Michael’s overall dimensions, given the novel’s inconsistencies. Whatever they wrote, Larry and Jerry envisioned the most compact possible vehicle that would get the job done. Note that Scott is showing an older version of my drawing that shows Michael with the shock absorber array fully compressed along with incorrect dimensions. The final dimensions I came up with are somewhat larger, on the same order as those Scott mentions in a separate post.

Regarding the comment that this is a slick ILM Hollywood design, I think this is reading quite a lot into a hemisphere, a rectangular prism and a shallow cone! Perhaps the commenter is confusing vehicle configuration design with render quality. These drawings were never intended to portray Michael’s actual exterior finish, surface markings, etc. These drawings were created way back when using an ancient vector-based illustration software application called MacDraw Pro. They look pretty awful and it’s certainly not the way I would render Michael today. In hindsight, I should have left them as line drawings and avoided the use of MacDraw Pro’s primitive shading tools.

Regarding the battleship-derived gun turrets, I agree with Scott’s assertion that the text of the book is vague in this area. But based on my discussions with Larry and Jerry, the authors definitely intended for Michael to include two of the full-up 16-inch Iowa class turrets, as well as some smaller gun turrets, not the guns alone.

Regarding the Shock absorbers array configuration, I disagree with you guys. Thinking that Michael is a straight extrapolation of the conventional Orion design configurations is incorrect. The primary purpose of the shock absorber array is, of course, to smooth out the “ride” for the payload/passenger portion of the vehicle. Most of the Orion designs were configured for non-military applications, whereas Michael is a maneuvering warship with massive nuclear pumped steam attitude thruster arrays. In addition to primary Orion thrusting, Michael will be subjected to multi-axial mechanical loads that are NOT along the longitudinal axis of the ship. Also consider that Michael’s design incorporates a pusher “shell” that is far more massive as a fraction of total vehicle mass than the typical Orion pusher plate design. When Michael is thrusting under primary propulsion while engaging in combat maneuvers, an angled shock absorber array design is a good choice for handling the inevitable side loads and for stabilizing the shell wrt the passenger/payload “brick”. Consider a high performance off road vehicle, which must provide chassis stability while the wheels and suspension are being subjected to loads from many directions. You don’t see any parallel straight up and down shock absorbers in the suspension system, do you?

If you look carefully at me design, you can see that that central shock absorber is longitudinal and more massive than the rest. This one is primarily responsible for handling the Orion propulsive loads. Perhaps it should be a bit beefier than I’ve depicted it in the original drawing. The remaining angled shock absorbers handle some of that propulsive load while also providing multi-axial stability. Admittedly, these 2D drawings don’t convey the Shock absorber array configuration that I have envisioned very well.

Since the time these drawing were created, I’ve discussed Michael with Larry and Jerry on a number of occasions. I’ve reconsidered and refined many of Michael’s technical aspects and I’ve designed a more detailed and representative configuration, including an updated shock absorber array. I’m also involved in creating my own high fidelity 3D model of Michael with a few fellow conspirators. I’m looking forward to sharing that with everyone at some point.

(ed note: one of those "few fellow conspirators" was me. Another was Andrew Presby, who is featured on one or two pages of this website.)

Artwork by Winchell Chung (me) using high-res version of Aldo Spadoni's blueprints. Commissioned by Aldo Spadoni.Click for larger image

Artwork by Winchell Chung (me) using high-res version of Aldo Spadoni's blueprints. Commissioned by Aldo Spadoni.Click for larger image

Artwork by Winchell Chung (me) using high-res version of Aldo Spadoni's blueprints. Commissioned by Aldo Spadoni. He used this commissioned image to make the stunning artwork below.Click for larger image

Aldo Spadoni: Michael as it might have appeared a short time
after lift-off, still in the lower atmosphere, right around Max Q. The
appearance of the nuclear propulsion pulse exhaust plume within the
atmosphere is strictly notional. Given that the explosions are roughly one
second apart, consider how much the visible fireball of a nuclear
explosion expands in one second. Probably quite a bit more than I’m
showing here. Also, given that these nuclear pulse units are essentially
shaped charges, the visible appearance of the plume may show some
directionality and distortion, and may not appear to be spherical. I’ve
firmly applied my “artistic license” to make the image look interesting,
but I do intend to further explore what an Orion drive exhaust plume might
actually look like.

Aldo Spadoni: We’ve all seen photos of atmospheric nuclear
testing conducted by the US from the 1940’s into the early 1960’s.
Obviously, obtaining a properly exposed photo of a nuke was quite a
challenge! In order to see any detail in the fireball, the photos were
exposed such that everything other than the fireball is generally dark.
Many of these photos have a distinctive red coloration. So, this image is
my attempt to envision what Michael’s flight through the lower atmosphere
may have looked like if it was photographed in the same manner. Again,
this is strictly notional.

Aldo Spadoni: Michael as it might have appeared as it
emerged from the upper atmosphere, still rising on its way to engage the
Fithp. The distance between propulsion pulses has increased as Michael’s
velocity increases. Michael has already deployed a few “spurt bombs” to
engage Fithp targets. Again, the appearance of the nuclear propulsion
pulses outside of the atmosphere is strictly notional. In George Dyson’s
book, “Project Orion,” Freeman Dyson described the appearance of the
propulsion explosions in space. He basically says that the explosions
themselves would be essentially invisible, or at least not very
spectacular. But when the directed propulsion debris strikes the ship’s
pusher plate, its kinetic energy would be converted to heat, generating a
bright flash. At some point, I intend to further explore what these
phenomena might actually look like.

Now, strictly by the novel, the Michael is a mile high, which is ludicrous. The protagonists would have to have built a mile-high dome to cover it, which the aliens might have found a bit suspicious. In the diagrams below, Mr. Lowther shows the "large" Michael (one mile) and the more reasonable "small" Michael (1/8th mile).

“Two great towers stood on the curve of the hemispherical shell, with cannon showing beneath the lip, aimed inward. Four smaller towers flanked them. A brick-shaped structure rose above them. The Brick was much less massive than the Shell, but its sides were covered with spacecraft: tiny gunships, and four Shuttles with tanks but no boosters. The bricks massive roof ran beyond the flanks to shield the Shuttles and gunships.” —from Footfall, pg. 432

Michael is one of the Orion based concepts I knew I would have to take a run at sooner or later. I referenced the novel, extensively, and Scott Lowther condensed all the design bits he gleaned from Footfall into an Excel spreadsheet, available here, for a project he set aside. The spreadsheet is an excellent guide to all the passages describing Message Bearer, the digit ships, Michael, the stovepipes and Shuttles, and it proved invaluable in my effort.

Most people are probably familiar with Aldo Spadoni's visualization of the iconic warship from Niven and Pournelle’s novel, but for those who are not, Aldo’s drawings are available here.

What I’ve done is meet the Aldo Spadoni design half-way with my own interpretations. My intent was to complement Aldo’s design-thought without entirely rewriting it, keeping in mind what Aldo had to say about the process. One point Aldo raised in conversation on Scott Lowther’s blog is in regards to who is providing description in various scenes from the novel.

Aldo Spadoni:“Footfall is a novel of course, not an engineering proposal for a space battleship. You glean details regarding the various Footfall spacecraft from the conversations of characters in the story, many of which are not experts [with regard to] what they are describing. As Scott also pointed out, there are inconsistencies in the descriptions that are either intentional or simply mistakes on the part of the authors. Thus, the design of the Footfall spacecraft are open to interpretation.”

Aldo makes a good case for the distinctive angled shock absorbers of his design, and I’ll provide his commentary below, the sticking point for me, however, is the parabolic pusher plate Niven and Pournelle describe—early design work on Orion solidly ruled out a parabolic pusher. With shaped-charge nuclear pulse units the parabolic plate will only heat up while offering almost no thrust advantage. Heating and impact stress on the pusher would be of no small concern, the bombs necessary to loft something the scale and mass of Michael would not be the tame little devices used to propel a dinky NASA/USAF 10-meter Orion. Heating is the cost of even partially containing the ionized plasma resulting from nuclear detonation.

Orion works because the plasma is dynamically shaped (as the explosion happens) by the specially designed shaped charge nuclear explosive, X-rays are channeled by the radiation case in the instant before the weapon is vaporized, these exit a single aperture, striking and heating up a beryllium oxide channel filler and propellant disk (tungsten), resulting in a narrow conical jet of ionized tungsten plasma, traveling at high velocity (in excess of 1.5 × 10⁵ meters per second). This crashes into the pusher plate, accelerating the spacecraft. The jet is not physically contained by the pusher, and contact with the pusher is infinitesimally brief, so the pusher is not subject to extreme heating during thrust maneuvers. So, while offering very little performance difference compared to a flat pusher design, the parabolic plate would need regenerative cooling in the bargain, adding weight and complexity to the system. Engineering such a pusher plate would be fraught with difficulties, and conditions under which Michael is built, in my opinion, rule out any eccentric messing with the baseline system. A legion of Ted Taylors would already be kept busy night and day with the mere task of readying a conventional Orion designed under such circumstances—for delivery under a one year drop-rocks-from-orbit-dead deadline.

As Aldo points out, the text of Footfall leaves room for different interpretations and here is where I took some of Aldo’s design-thought and creatively merged it with my own toward the end of addressing the design as presented in the novel. (No, not the army of Ted Taylor clones inhabiting a maze of cubicles in some deep bunker somewhere—that’s just me.)

It occurred to me that what Aldo had done (following Niven and Pournelle’s description), was move the functions of the Orion standard propulsion module down, mounting them directly on the top of the plate, so really it’s a built up intermediate platform/propulsion module. What I’ve done is run with that thought: I chose to treat the entire pusher plate as an early large Orion: a dome sitting on flat pusher plate, concentric rows of toroidal shock absorbers surrounding a core array of gas-piston shock absorbers. There is no central hole-and-bomb-placement-gun-protection-tube in my design (but there is an anti-ablation oil spray system). Instead, pulse units are shot by bomb placement guns mounted to fire around the edge; exactly as in Aldo’s design (the early large Orion had rocket assisted bombs riding tracks on the exterior of the spacecraft—imagine the show that would make). The body of the “dome” in my design is stowage for tanked pressurization gas (for the shock absorbers), anti-ablation oil, and perhaps a reserve number of pulse units.

I’ve retained the scheme of duel pulse unit magazines. Niven & Pournelle called them “thrust bomb” towers. Four “spurt bomb” towers are also mounted to the base—the “spurt bomb” Niven and Pournelle describe is a type of bomb-pumped laser using gamma-radiation rather than X-rays. All of my towers are a good deal beefier than those on Aldo’s design. Narrative in the novel describes the “thrust bomb” towers as doing double duty, providing an extra layer of armor and shielding for the CIC/control room, the nerve center of the spacecraft, which is located in the lower portion of the Brick, wedged between two large water tanks (and two nuclear reactor containment vessels). The water tanks are frozen at lift-off, providing Michael with an ample heat-sink.

As I mentioned above, Aldo makes an excellent case for the angled shock absorbers on his design, his description below:

Aldo Spadoni:“Most of the Orion designs were configured for non-military applications, whereas Michael is a maneuvering warship with massive nuclear pumped steam attitude thruster arrays. In addition to primary Orion thrusting, Michael will be subjected to multi-axial mechanical loads that are NOT along the longitudinal axis of the ship. … When Michael is thrusting under primary propulsion while engaging in combat maneuvers, an angled shock absorber array design is a good choice for handling the inevitable side loads and for stabilizing the shell [with regard to] the passenger/payload “brick.” Consider a high performance off road vehicle, which must provide chassis stability while the wheels and suspension are being subjected to loads from many directions. You don’t see any parallel straight up and down shock absorbers in the suspension system, do you?

If you look carefully at my design, you can see that that central shock absorber is longitudinal and more massive than the rest. This one is primarily responsible for handling the Orion propulsive loads. … The remaining angled shock absorbers handle some of that propulsive load while also providing multi-axial stability.”

Scott Lowther:“I remain unconvinced at the off-axis "angled" shock absorbers, but they seem to be the popular approach. However, if you do go that route, you have to deal with the central piston in the same way... ball joints fore and aft. *All* the pistons must be free to swing from side to side. If one, even the central one, is locked, then either the pusher assembly cannot move sideways *thus negating the value of the angled shocks), or it'll simply get ripped off its mounts the first time there's an off-axis blast.

Given that the ship is clearly described as having nuclear steam rockets for attitude control, I don't see the value in off-axis blasts for steering. But... shrug.”

I spent a good deal of time reproducing Aldo’s shock absorber array because frankly I think it is brilliant, going back and forth between Aldo’s drawings and my file … in the end the detail would be invisible, so I created a cutaway render with two of the “spurt bomb” towers removed to reveal the system.

True to the novel Michael’s main guns are the 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 gun and turret taken directly off the New Jersey. There is a good deal of discussion (on Scott’s blog and elsewhere) on the suitability of the guns and turrets—the mounting is rotated ninety degrees to vertical relative to the orientation turret, guns, and loading mechanisms were designed for—however, Aldo is quite clear that mounting the full turrets “as is” reflects the author’s intention, and so I’ve kept to their vision in this regard.

In the novel the guns are described firing a nuclear artillery round, this would be a modern version of the W23 15-20 kiloton nuclear round. The Mark 23 was a further development of the Army's Mk-9 & Mk-19 280mm artillery shell. This was a 15-20 kiloton nuclear warhead adapted to a 16 in naval shell used on the 4 Iowa Class Battleships1. 50 of these weapons were produced starting in 1956 but shortly after their introduction the four Iowa's were mothballed. The weapon stayed in the nuclear inventory until October 1962. Presumably under war conditions a new production run would produce the numbers necessary for Michael’s assault on Message Bearer.

Secondary batteries: a generic turret roughly based on the secondary turrets of the Iowa class.

The “Battle Management Array” is a set of phased-array radars and tight-beam communications antenna for passing targeting information to Michaels secondary spacecraft, all mounted to a pair of shock-isolated cab, each riding its own set of shock absorbers, one mounted atop each “thrust bomb” tower. A fall-back set of communications antenna and radar are mounted beneath the overhang of the forward shield atop the Brick.

I’ve gone with the dimensions Scott arrived at, which Aldo confirmed in his comments on Scott’s blog: Length:742’ Diameter: 371’.

Different opinions have been offered in regards to Michael’s mass, between 35,000 and 50,000 tons have been opinioned on Scott Lowther’s blog. Pournelle was quoted as saying 2 million tons on one occasion, and 7 million tons on another.

Michaels launch, in the novel, is shortened for reasons of narrative brevity; one character wonders if there were perhaps 30 or more nuclear detonations. Putting Michael in orbit would require 8 minutes of powered flight and about 480 bombs lit off at one bomb per second.

The novel is clear that Michael carries four Space Shuttles mounted to their external tanks sans their SRBs. The number of Gunships is less clear. Nine Gunships are described as destroyed in combat, an unspecified number survive to confront Message Bearer in the final scene. Designing the most compact spacecraft necessary to fill the role, my Gunship measures 100 feet in length, 25 feet in diameter. At these dimensions, 14 Gunships total can be comfortably mounted to Michaels flanks.

“They take one of the main guns off a Navy ship. Wrap a spaceship around it. Not a lot of ship, just enough to steer it. Add an automatic loader and nuclear weapons for shells. Steer it with TV.” —from Footfall, pg. 354

In the novel these Gunships are referred to as “Stovepipe’s.” I was far less concerned with designing to match that narrative description than I was with designing the most compact spacecraft possible capable of the mission described. Michaels construction (including all its auxiliary spacecraft and subsystems) takes place in secret under wartime conditions, perhaps the moniker is derived from a code name picked randomly (that’s how the 1958 Project Orion was named), or perhaps dockworkers handling the vehicle sections, packed in featureless cylindrical shipping containers strapped to pallets, named the craft, and it stuck. See Aldo Spadoni’s commentary on character-delivered descriptions on my Michael post.

The nuclear round fired by the Gunship would be something akin to the UCLR1 Swift, a 622 mm long, 127 mm diameter nuclear shell, weighing in at 43.5 kg.

In 1958 a fusion warhead was developed and tested. At its test it yielded only 190 tons; it failed to achieve fusion and only the initial fission explosion worked correctly. There are unconfirmed reports that work on similar concepts continued into the 1970s and resulted in a one-kiloton warhead design for 5-inch (127 mm) naval gun rounds, these, however, were never deployed as operational weapons. See paragraph 9 (not counting the bulleted list) under United States Nuclear Artillery.

Gunship Crew & Crew Module

The text of the novel is unclear on the number of crew manning the Gunships, but my opinion is no more than 2 would be required, and dialogue in the novel tends to back this up. The loading mechanism is automated, so only targeting and piloting skills are involved. Considering urgency involved in readying Michael, I doubt an entirely new capsule, man-rated for spaceflight, would be considered. Michaels designers would fall back on tried and tested designs and modify them as required. In this case a stripped down Gemini spacecraft and its Equipment Module fits the bill nicely. The life support system matches the mission requirements. Leave off the heat shield (these are one-way missions), and reaction control system—the capsule never operates separate from the Gunship rig. Mount targeting and firing controls for the gun. Probably a single hatch rather than Gemini’s double hatch, and internal flat-screen displays rather than viewports—looking on this battle with naked eyes would leave the astronaut seared, radiation burned, and blinded.

Eight SRBs akin to the GEM-40 allow options: they could be fired in pairs, allowing four separate burns, or two burns of 4, or a single burn of all eight – needs depending. The SRBs are strapped around a ten foot diameter 40 foot long core containing ample tank stowage for hypergolic reaction control propellants, pressurization gas, and nitrogen for clearing the breech and gun barrel. The reaction control system is used to aim the gun; propellant expenditure would be prodigious.

The nuclear pulse Orion drive propulsion system had both reasonably high exhaust velocity coupled with incredible amounts of thrust, a rare and valuable combination. A pity it was driven by sequential detonation of hundreds of nuclear bombs, and required two stages of huge shock absorbers to prevent the spacecraft from being kicked to pieces.

Andrews Space & Technology tried to design a variant on the nuclear Orion that would reduce the drawbacks but keep the advantages. The result was the Mini-Mag Orion.

First off, they crafted the explosive pulses so each was more 50 to 500 gigajoules each, instead of the 20,000 gigajoules typically found in the nuclear Orion. Secondly they made the explosions triggered by the explosive charge being squeezed into critical mass using an external power source instead of each charge being a self-contained easily-weaponized device. Thirdly they made the blast thrust against the magnetic field of a series of superconducting rings (Magnetic Nozzle) instead of the nuclear Orion's flat metal pusher plate.

The "compression target" is the pulse unit proper, containing the 245Cm sphere. The orange cone is two layers of LMTL that conducts the current from the pulse power banks into the compression target.

The permanent electrodes are part of the engine. The pulse unit LMTL contacts the electrodes, sending the current into the compression target. Insulating gap distance g0 is from 0.002 m to 0.04 m.

In the standard nuclear pulse Orion, the pulse units are totally self-contained, that is, they are bombs. Since this makes it too easy to use the pulse units as impromptu weapons (which alarms the people in charge of funding such a spacecraft) a non-weaponizable pulse unit was designed. The Mini-Mag Orion pulse unit has the fissionable curium-245 nuclear explosive, an inexpensive Z-pinch coil to detonate it, but no power supply for the coil. The Z-pinch power comes from huge capacitor pulse power banks mounted on the spacecraft, i.e., the pulse unit ain't anywhere near being "self contained". The banks have a mass of a little over seven metric tons, far too large to use in a weapon (especially one that explodes with a pathetic 0.03 kilotons of yield). The Z-pinch coil should be inexpensive since it will be destroyed in the blast.

For a 50 gigajoule yield (with a burn fraction of 10%), the nuclear explosive is 42.9 grams of curium-245 in the form of a hollow sphere 1.27 centimeters radius (yes, I know the diagram above says the compression target is 0.47 centimeters radius. I think they mean the compressed size). This is coated with 15.2 grams of beryllium to act as a neutron reflector. According to the table below, a 120.7 gigajoule yield uses 21 grams of curium, which does not make sense to me. Usually you need more nuclear explosive to make a bigger burst. I guess the pulse units in the table have a larger burn fraction. The Z-pinch will squeeze the curium sphere from a radius of 1.27 centimeter down to 0.468 centimeters, leading to a chain reaction and nuclear explosion. Since curium-245 has a low spontaneous fission rate, the pulse unit will need a deuterium/tritium diode to provide the triggering neutrons. The pulse units will be detonated about one per second (1 Hz).

The Z-pinch needs 70 megaAmps of electricity. This is 70 million amps, which is a freaking lot of amps. The trouble is that you cannot lay big thick cables to the Z-pinch coil in the pulse unit. The cable will be vaporized by the nuclear explosion, which is OK. But a vaporized massive cable composed of heavy elements will drastically lower the exhaust velocity. This is very not OK. Remember that one of the selling points of the Mini-Mag Orion is the high exhaust velocity. Reduce the exhaust velocity and Mini-Mag Orion becomes much less attractive.

So instead of heavy cables the pulse unit uses gossamer thin sheets of Mylar (20 μ thick). I know that Mylar is usually considered an insulator, but 70 megaAmps does not care if it is an insulator or not. The report calls these Mylar cables Low Mass Transmission Lines (LMTL). They have a total mass of only 2 kilograms, which is good news for the exhaust velocity.

The 70 megaAmps go from the pulse power banks to permanent electrodes mounted on the magnetic nozzle. These take the form of five meter diameter metal rings. Two rings, positive and negative, just like the two slots in an electrical wall socket. The pulse unit proper is a minimum of 0.0244 meters diameter (double the 1.27 centimeter radius). So the LMTL has to stretch from the permanent electrodes to the pulse unit. This makes a five meter diameter disk of Mylar with with the grape sized pulse unit in the center. Actually two stacked Mylar disks (positive and negative) separated by about 2 centimeters of space (g0 in diagram above) so they won't short circuit. Ordinarily you'd use an insulator to prevent a short, something like, for instance, Mylar. Unfortunately here you are using Mylar as the conductor so instead you need a gap. The edge of each Mylar disk has an aluminum rim, each making contact with one of the magnetic nozzle's two permanent electrodes.

To place the pulse unit in the proper detonation point inside the magnetic nozzle, the pulse unit has to be five meters lower than the permanent electrodes in the nozzle. This forces the Mylar LMTL to be an upside down cone instead of a flat disk.

The pulse unit, Mylar LMTL and the aluminum rims are all vaporized during detonation. The magnetic nozzle with its permanent electrodes remain.

There are two power supplies: the steady-state reactor and the pulse power banks.

The reactor is the "charger." It charges up the superconducting magnetic nozzle, and gives the pulse power banks their initial charge. Finally it supplies power to the payload (including the habitat module). In the reference designs below, it outputs 103 kilowatts, has a mass of 9 metric tons, and is expected to supply 50 kilowatts to the payload. It takes 1 hour to give the pulse power banks (main and backup) their initial charge, and takes 39 hours to charge up the superconducting magnetic nozzle. Since the nozzle uses superconductors, its charge will last a long time before it leaks out.

The reactor has to supply 192 megajoules over one hour to charge up the main and backup pulse power banks. The reactor has to supply 7,446 megajoules over 39 hours to charge up the superconducting nozzle.

The tiny bombs need 70 megaAmps in 1.2 microseconds in order to detonate, but the reactor can only produce that many amps in one hour. The standard solution is to use capacitors, which can be gradually filled up but can dump all their stored energy almost instantly. This is the pulse power banks, a Marx bank of capacitors.

The reactor takes half an hour to charge up one pulse power bank, one hour to charge up the bank and the backup bank. The bank discharges all that energy into the pulse unit to detonate it. A separate system in the magnetic nozzle converts about 1 percent of the explosion into electricity and totally recharges the pulse power bank. For subsequent detonations, the reactor is not needed, the detonating bombs supply the power.

In the reference design, the pulse power banks hold 96 megaJoules per bank, there is a main bank and a backup bank for a total of 192 megaJoules, each bank has a mass of 3.5 metric tons, main and backup bank have a combined mass of 7.1 metric tons. The banks have to sustain a pulse unit detonation rate of 1 per second (1 Hz).

The backup bank is in case of a misfire, resulting in a lack of a recharge for the main bank. The still-full backup bank takes over energizing the pulse detonations while the reactor starts slowly re-charging the main bank.

Since the electrical system will be operating at megawatt levels, it will need a sizable set of heat radiators (Thermal Management System). By "sizable" we mean "up to 30% of the spacecraft's dry mass." In the first reference mission, the radiators have to handle 2,576 kW of waste heat, with the radiators having a mass of 15,456 kg and a surface area of 7,728 square meters.

The heat radiators are tapered in order to keep them inside the shadow cast by the radiation shadow shield. This keeps the radiators relatively free of neutron activation and neutron embrittlement. It also prevents the radiators from backscattering deadly nuclear radiation into the crew compartment.

The engine core and feed mechanism will have to inject the pulse units into the detonation point at rates of up to 1 Hz. It too will need redundancy and a minimum of moving parts.

In the second diagram above:

Cycle begins. A pulse unit is at the detonation point with its LMTL contact rings touching the magnetic nozzle's permanent electrodes. Both blast doors are closed. The nozzle is fully extended.

70 megaAmps detonates the pulse unit. The explosion transmits force into the magnetic nozzle, producing thrust. 1% of the blast energy is converted into electricity which re-charges the pulse power bank. The nozzle moves upward along the feed system as part of the compression cycle. Meanwhile, the upper blast door opens to allow the next pulse unit to enter the feed system.

The explosion plasma dissipates. The nozzle continues to move upward. As the next pulse unit enters the feed system, the upper blast door closes.

The lower blast door opens. The nozzle reaches its highest position. The fresh pulse unit is injected into nozzle at the detonation point with a velocity matching the nozzle, LMTL contact rings of pulse unit touching nozzle's permanent electrodes. The lower blast door closes as the nozzle starts to travel downward along the feed system. When the nozzle reaches it lowest point, a new cycle begins.

The report had three sample "Design Reference Missions", and created optimal spacecraft using MiniMag Orion propulsion. As it turns out, the spacecraft for mission 1 and mission 2 were practically identical, so they only showed the two ship designs.

NASA Space Tug

This is a spiffy design for giant robot fans. Those titanic mecha arms will immediately grab the attention anybody who adores Jaegers.

NASA Space Tug

ΔV

3,800 m/s

Specific Power

3.5 kW/kg(3,520 W/kg)

Thrust Power

49.3 megawatts

Propulsion

Chemical

Specific Impulse

450 s

Exhaust Velocity

4,400 m/s

Wet Mass

32,000 kg

Dry Mass

14,000 kg

Mass Ratio

2.3

Mass Flow

5 kg/s

Thrust

22,400 n

Initial Acceleration

0.17 g (lunar g)

Payload

5,900 kg

Length

?

Diameter

?

This is a 1970's era NASA concept for a modular space tug. The "waldo" arms on the crew module are interesting. The Grumman image said that the space tug had a wet mass of 70,000 pounds, 40,000 pounds of fuel (oxygen-hydrogen), and 13,000 pounds of payload (presumably implying 17,000 pounds of structural mass). This implies a mass ratio of about 2.3, and 3,800 m/s of ΔV. You need about 2,370 m/s to land on Luna.

Images courtesy of NASA. Magazine cover by David Hardy. Two images following magazine cover by Robert McCall.

Cover by David Hardy.

Artwork by Robert McCall.

Artwork by Robert McCall.

Nuclear DC-X

Nuclear DC-X

Propulsion

pebble-bed NTR

Propulsion

LANTR

NTR Specific Impulse

1000 s

LANTR Specific Impulse

600 s

NTR Exhaust Velocity

9,810 m/s

LANTR Exhaust Velocity

5,900 m/s

Wet Mass

460,000 kg?

Dry Mass

? kg

Mass Ratio

?

ΔV

? m/s

Mass Flow

? kg/s

NTR Thrust per engine

1,112,000 n

LANTR Thrust per engine

3,336,000 n

NTR Thrust total

5,560,000 n

LANTR Thrust total

16,680,000 n

NTR Acceleration

12 g?

LANTR Acceleration

38 g?

Payload

100,000 kg

Length

103 m

Diameter

10 m

This is from a report called AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2004-0024 Advanced Propulsion Study (2004). It is a single stage to orbit vehicle using a LANTR for propulsion. They figure it can put about 100 metric tons into orbit at a cost of $150 per kilogram. You can read the details in the report.

In the System States Era asteroid mining operations thrive throughout the asteroid belt and among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn the Martian terraforming program has left legacy: a sprawling archipelago of island stations and industrialized moons, Bernal Sphere's and O'Neill Cylinders, Spindle and Wheel cities, and a population of humanity growing into the millions. Space colonies are independent city-states and trade is their lifeblood. Entire generations are born and live their lives in spinning cylinders, bubbles, and torus shaped habitats, harvesting, mining, and fabricating all they need from the environment of the outer solar system.

For a table of Delta V required for travel using Hohmann orbits among the moons of Saturn seeWhy Saturn on Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site. Scroll a little further down the page and you will find a Synodic Periods and Transit Times for Hohmann Travel table for Moons of Saturn.

Nuclear propulsion Systems: Operational Constraints

The abundance of various chemical ices for use as reaction mass among the moons of the outer system gas giants makes NERVA an excellent option for commercial application. Nuclear thermal rockets provide excellent efficiency; they also impose certain operational restrictions. The engine emits significant levels of radiation while firing and even after shut-down, and while passengers and crew are protected by the engines shadow-shield and hydrogen tanks, you wouldn’t want to point the engine at other spacecraft or space platforms. During the U.S. nuclear thermal rocket engine development program NFSD contractors had recommended that no piloted spacecraft approach to within 100 miles behind or to the sides of an operating NERVA I engine. The only safe approach to a spacecraft with a NERVA engine is through the conical “safe-zone” within the radiation shadow created by its shadow-shield and hydrogen tanks. Docking NERVA propelled spacecraft to a space station or habitat is problematic because structures protruding outside the conical safe-zone can reflect radiation back at the spacecraft, irradiating the passengers and crew.

These facts impose a set of mandatory operational parameters and flight rules for nuclear operation. An exclusion zone for nuclear propulsion (60 kilometers minimum) is imposed around every orbital platform. Orbital Guard units would hold broad discretionary powers—violate an exclusion-zone or disregard traffic-control and the local guard will cheerfully vaporize your spacecraft. No warning shots, no second chances. A crew that violates flight rules doesn’t live long enough to worry about fines or attorney fees, and the public’s time and funds are not wasted with trials of incompetent captains and crew.

Nuclear Freighters “park” propulsion modules in station-keeping orbit with their destination, and the freight/passenger module undocks, separating from its nuclear propulsion module, proceeding to birthing under thrust of a chemical maneuvering unit.

Because the nuclear propulsion modules are valuable, and are potentially deadly missiles if mishandled — codes to access the autonomous flight computer and possession of the nuclear propulsion module are temporarily handed over to the local orbital-guard for safe keeping.

For a good example of Space traffic control see the entry on Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site here and scroll down to quote from Manna by Lee Correy.

At this point in my future history, 750 years post Martian colonization, spacecraft are essentially stacks of common modules which can be swapped out to suit application.

Independent Operators, like today’s truckers, might “own” only the CMOD (Command Module) with other units being leased per flight. The Freight Carrying Structural Spine, essentially a rigid frame with mountings for cargo modules, might be leased by the shipper and loaded with cargo (but owned by a separate freight transport supplier) and since different payloads mass differently it might be the responsibility of the shipper to lease suitable nuclear and chemical propulsion modules rated to the task. Passenger transport services might likewise lease passenger modules of varying capacity and Transport Brokerage firms would coordinate freight and passenger payloads assigned to same destinations and offer these in an open-bid market.

PARTS Plasma Accelerated Reusable Transport System

P.A.R.T.S. is a 2002 study by the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for a reusable Earth-Mars cargo spacecraft utilizing a VASIMR propulsion system powered by an on-board nuclear reactor. The report has lots of juicy details, especially about the reactor. Thanks go out to William Seney for bringing this study to my attention.

Pilgrim Observer

RocketCat sez

Another blast from the past! Rocket fans who built this plastic model back in the 1970's agree it makes the needle of their Nostalgia-meter slam over and wrap itself around the end peg. But what is more astonishing is the real-world roots of the blasted thing. Sure it has a couple of design problems, but it makes far more scientific sense than 99% of the other plastic models.

Pilgrim Observer

Propulsion

NERVA 2b

Propulsion

Uprated J2 chemical

NERVA Specific Impulse

850 s

J2 Specific Impulse

~450 s

NERVA Exhaust Velocity

8,300 m/s

J2 Exhaust Velocity

4,400 m/s

Wet Mass

? kg

Dry Mass

? kg

Mass Ratio

?

ΔV

? m/s

NERVA Mass Flow

13 kg/s

J2 Mass Flow

25 kg/s

NERVA Thrust

110,000 newtons

J2 Thrust

110,000 newtons

Initial Acceleration

? g

Payload

? kg

Length

30 m + boom

Diameter

46 m

The Pilgrim Observer was a plastic model kit issued by MPC back in 1970 (MPC model #9001) designed by G. Harry Stine. Many of us oldster have fond memories of the kit. It was startlingly scientifically accurate, especially compared its contemporaries (ST:TOS Starship Enterprise, ST:TOS Klingon Battlecruiser, Galactic Cruiser Leif Ericson).

The model kit included a supplemental booklet just full of all sorts of fascinating details. NERVA engine design, mission plan, all sorts of goodies with the conspicuous absence of the mass ratio and the total delta-V.

The kit has been recently re-issued, and those interested in realistic spacecraft design could learn a lot by building one. If you do, please look into the metal photoetched add-on kit, and alternate decals. Round 2 Models (the company who re-issued the kit) have some detailed kit building instructions here.

The Pilgrim makes a cameo appearance in Jerry Pournelle's short story "Tinker", in the role of the Boostship Agamemnon, and in Allen Steele's short story The Weight as the Medici Explorer.

Original model kit

Recent re-issue

The design is interesting, and has a lot of innovative elements. For one, it uses a species of gimbaled centrifuge to deal with the artificial gravity problem. It also uses distance to augment its radiation shielding, in order to save on mass and increase payload. This is done by mounting the NERVA solid core nuclear rocket on a telescoping boom.

One major flaw with the Pilgrim's design is the fact that one of the three spinning arms is the power reactor. This means that all the ship's power supply has to be conducted through a titanic slip-ring, since there can be no solid connection between the spin part and the stationary part. Another flaw is if you are going to all the trouble to put the NERVA reactor on a boom to get the radiation far away from the crew, why would you put the radioactive power reactors on an arm right next to the crew?

Anyway, the Pilgrim is an orbit-to-orbit spacecraft that is incapable of landing on a planet. It has a ten man crew (four crew and six scientists), and has enough life support endurance to keep them alive for five years. It could also be used as a space station, in LEO, GEO, or lunar orbit. In launch configuration the NERVA boom is retracted and the spinning arms are locked down. In this configuration it is 100 feet long and 33 feet wide, which fits on top of the second stage of a Saturn V booster. A disposable shroud is placed over the top of the spacecraft to make it more aerodynamic during launch.

Level

Gravity

Level 6

0.05g

Level 5

0.06g

Level 4

0.07g

Level 3

0.08g

Level 2

0.09g

Level 1

0.10g

After launch, the shroud is jettisoned, the spinning arms deploy, and the NERVA engine's boom telescopes out. The spinning arm array has a diameter of 150 feet. The arms will rotate at a rate of two revolutions per minute (safely below the 3 RPM nausea limit). This will produce about one-tenth Earth gravity at the tips of the arms (Level 1), which fades to zero gravity at the rotation axis. Not much but better than nothing. The spherical center section does not spin, a special transfer cabin is used to move between the spin and non-spin sections.

One arm is the crew quarters, one is a hydroponic garden for the closed ecological life support system, and the third is a stack of advanced Space Nuclear Auxiliary Power (SNAP) reactors using Brayton cycle nuclear power units.

Under thrust, the arms must be angled to align with the vector sum of the centripetal acceleration and the thrust acceleration. Otherwise the direction of "down" will appear to be towards the rear-wall/floor corner of the cabin, and the rooom will feel like it is tipped on its corner. Artwork by Zubie of the blog Constant Variations.

Control center

Astrotug

The center section is divided into the Main Control Center at the top and the Service Section at the bottom. The very top of the Control Center has the large telescope, radar, and other sensors. By virtue of being mounted on the non-spin section, the astronomers and astrogators can make their observations without having to cope with all the stars spinning around. Also mounted here is the antenna farm for communications and telemetry.

The Pilgrim carries two auxiliary vehicles: a modified Apollo command and service module, and a one-man astrotug similar to the worker pods seen in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. They mate with Universal Docking Adaptors on the non-spin section.

The chemical propulsion system consists of three up-rated J-2 rocket engines with a thrust of 250,000 lbs, fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

The nuclear thermal propulsion system consists of one solid-core NERVA 2B, using liquid hydrogen as propellant. The NERVA has a specific impulse of 850 seconds, a thrust of 250,000 pounds, and an engine mass of 35,000 pounds (the fact that both the J-2 and the NERVA have identical thrust makes me wonder if that is a misprint). It uses a de Laval type convergent-divergent rocket nozzle. The reactor core has a temperature of 4500°F. The core of the reactor is encased in a beryllium neutron reflector shell. Inside the reflector and surrounding the reactor core are twelve control rods. Each rod is composed of beryllium with a boron neutron absorber plate along one side. By rotating the control rods, the amount of neutrons reflected or absorbed can be controlled, and thus control the fission chain reaction in the reactor core.

There is a dome shaped shadow shield on top of the NERVA to protect the crew from radiation. In addition, the NERVA is on a long boom, adding the inverse square law to reduce the amount of radiation. And finally, the cosmic ray shielding around the crew quarters provides even more protection.

Various attitude control and ullage rockets are located at strategic spots, they are fueled by hypergolic propellants.

The mission will start in June of 1979. Mission is an Earth-Mars-Venus-Earth swing-by. It will have a mission duration of 710 days, as compared to the 971 days required for a simple Mars orbiting round trip. This is done with clever gravitational sling-shots, and use of the NERVA 2B.

Mission starts with an orbital plane change to a 200 nautical mile circular Earth orbit inclined 23°27' (i.e., co-planar with the ecliptic). Transarean insertion burn is made with the three J-2 chemical engines (D+0). At this point the Pilgrim 1 becomes the Pilgrim-Observer space vehicle. It will coast for 227 days. Then it will perform a retrograde burn with the NERVA to achieve a circumarean orbit (Mars orbit) with a periapsis of 500 nautical miles and a high point of 5,800 nautical miles (D+227).

The Pilgrim-Observer will spend 48 days in Martian orbit (including several close approaches to Phobos). Then the NERVA will thrust into a transvenerian trajectory (D+275). It will coast for 246 days, including a close approach and fly-by of the asteroid Eros occurring 145 days after transvenerian burn (D+320).

The NERVA will burn into a circumvenarian orbit of of 500 nautical miles (D+521). It will spend 55 days studying Venus.

The NERVA will thrust into a transearth injection (D+576). It will coast for 140 days. Upon Earth approach, it will burn into a 200 nautical mile Earth orbit (D+710). The crew will be out shipped by a shuttle craft following extensive debriefing.

I did some back of the envelope calculations, and the numbers look fishy to me. An Earth-Mars Hohmann and Mars capture orbit will take a delta V of about 5,200 m/s. This is done with the J-2 chemical engine, and will require a mass ratio of 3.3. That is not a problem.

The problem comes with the NERVA burns. The Mars-Venus burn and the Venus-Earth burns have a total of about 14,800 k/s. With a NERVA exhaust velocity of 8,300 m/s, this implies a mass ratio of 5.9. I'm sorry but without staging you are going to be lucky to get a mass ratio above 4.0.

The plastic model kit is allegedly 1:100 scale according to the kit instructions. However, expert model builders who did measurements figured out that various parts are clumsily in different scales. The "arms folded mode" diameter is supposed to be 33 feet, to fit on top of a Saturn V, that is 1:127 scale. The rotating arms and the Apollo M are more like 1:144 to 1:200 scale. At 1:100 the arms have a deck spacing of a cramped 5 feet, the passage connecting the arm to the ship proper is only 2.5 feet in diameter, and the command module on the Apollo M is 20% smaller than the real Apollo CM. So the scale of the plastic model kit is a mess.

BoostShip Agamemnon

The Agamemnon is basically the Pilgrim Observer with the NERVA solid core NTR swapped out for an ion drive powered by a deuterium fusion reactor.

A Step Farther Out

IBS Agamemnon

Total ΔV

280,000 m/s

Specific Power

39 kW/kg(39,000 W/kg)

Thrust Power

1.1 terawatts

Exhaust velocity

220,000 m/s

Thrust

10,000,000 n

Wet Mass

100,000 mt

Dry Mass

28,000 mt

Mass Ratio

3.57

Ship Mass

8,000 mt

Cargo Mass

20,000 mt

Length

400 m

Length spin arm

100 m

T/W >1.0

no

IBS Agamemnon (Interplanetary Boost Ship) masses 100,000 tons as she leaves Earth orbit. She carries up to 2000 passengers with their life support requirements. Not many of these will be going first-class, though; many will be colonists, or even convicts, headed out steerage under primitive conditions.

Her destination is Pallas, which at the moment is 4 AU from Earth, and she carries 20,000 tons of cargo, mostly finished goods, tools, and other high-value items they don't make out in the Belt yet. Her cargo and passengers were sent up to Earth orbit by laser-launchers; Agamemnon will never set down on anything larger than an asteroid.

She boosts out at 10 cm/sec2, 1/100 gravity, for about 15 days, at which time she's reached about 140 km/second. Now she'll coast for 40 days, then decelerate for another 15. When she arrives at Pallas she'll mass 28,000 tons. The rest has been burned off as fuel and reaction mass. It's a respectable payload, even so.

The reaction mass must be metallic, and it ought to have a reasonably low boiling point. Cadmium, for example, would do nicely. Present-day ion systems want cesium, but that's a rare metal—liquid, like mercury—and unlikely to be found among the asteroids, or cheap enough to use as fuel from Earth.

In a pinch I suppose she could use iron for reaction mass. There's certainly plenty of that in the Belt. But iron boils at high temperatures, and running iron vapor through them would probably make an unholy mess out of the ionizing screens. The screens would have to be made of something that won't melt at iron vapor temperatures. Better, then, to use cadmium if you can get it.

The fuel would be hydrogen, or, more likely, deuterium, which they'll call "dee." Dee is "heavy hydrogen," in that it has an extra neutron, and seems to work better for fusion. We can assume that it's available in tens-of-ton quantities in the asteroids. After all, there should be water ice out there, and we've got plenty of power to melt it and take out hydrogen, then separate out the dee.

(ed note: 1,100 gigawatts requires burning about 0.014 kilograms of deuterium per second. For 30 days total burn time this will require about 36 metric tons of deuterium.)

If it turns out there's no dee in the asteroids it's not a disaster. Shipping dee will become one of the businesses for interplanetary supertankers.

From Life Among the Asteroids by Jerry Pournelle, collected in A Step Farther Out (1975)

The other screen lit, giving us what the Register knew about Agamemnon. It didn't look good. She was an enormous old cargo-passenger ship, over thirty years old—and out here that's old indeed. She'd been built for a useful life of half that, and sold off to Pegasus Lines when P&L decided she wasn't safe.

Her auxiliary power was furnished by a plutonium pile. If something went wrong with it, there was no way to repair it in space. Without auxiliary power, the life-support systems couldn't function.

I switched the comm system to Record. "Agamemnon, this is cargo tug Slingshot. I have your Mayday. Intercept is possible, but I cannot carry sufficient fuel and mass to decelerate your ship. I must vampire your dee and mass, I say again, we must transfer your fuel and reaction mass to my ship.

"We have no facilities for taking your passengers aboard. We will attempt to take your ship in tow and decelerate using your deuterium and reaction mass. Our engines are modified General Electric Model five-niner ion-fusion. Preparations for coming to your assistance are under way. Suggest your crew begin preparations for fuel transfer. Over."

The Register didn't give anywhere near enough data about Agamemnon. I could see from the recognition pix that she carried her reaction mass in strap-ons alongside the main hull, rather than in detachable pods right forward the way Slinger does. That meant we might have to transfer the whole lot before we could start deceleration.

She had been built as a general-purpose ship, so her hull structure forward was beefy enough to take the thrust of a cargo pod—but how much thrust? If we were going to get her down, we'd have to push like hell on her bows, and there was no way to tell if they were strong enough to take it.

The refinery crew had built up fuel pods for Slinger before, so they knew what I needed, but they'd never made one that had to stand up to a full fifth of a gee. A couple of centimeters is hefty acceleration when you boost big cargo, but we'd have to go out at a hundred times that.

They launched the big fuel pod with strap-on solids, just enough thrust to get it away from the rock so I could catch it and lock on. We had hours to spare, and I took my time matching velocities. Then Hal and I went outside to make sure everything was connected right.

Slingshot is basically a strongly built hollow tube with engines at one end and clamps at the other. The cabins are rings around the outside of the tube. We also carry some deuterium and reaction mass strapped on to the main hull, but for big jobs there's not nearly enough room there. Instead, we build a special fuel pod that straps onto the bow. The reaction mass can be lowered through the central tube when we're boosting.

Boost cargo goes on forward of the fuel pod. This time we didn't have any going out, but when we caught up to Agamemnon she'd ride there, no different from any other cargo capsule. That was the plan, anyway. Taking another ship in tow isn't precisely common out here.

Everything matched up. Deuterium lines, and the elevator system for handling the mass and getting it into the boiling pots aft; it all fit.

Ship's engines are complicated things. First you take deuterium pellets and zap them with a big laser. The dee fuses to helium. Now you've got far too much hot gas at far too high a temperature, so it goes into an MHD system that cools it and turns the energy into electricity.

Some of that powers the lasers to zap more dee. The rest powers the ion drive system. Take a metal, preferably something with a low boiling point like cesium, but since that's rare out here cadmium generally has to do. Boil it to a vapor. Put the vapor through ionizing screens that you keep charged with power from the fusion system.

Squirt the charged vapor through more charged plates to accelerate it, and you've got a drive. You've also got a charge on your ship, so you need an electron gun to get rid of that.

There are only about nine hundred things to go wrong with the system. Superconductors for the magnetic fields and charge plates: those take cryogenic systems, and those have auxiliary systems to keep them going. Nothing's simple, and nothing's small, so out of Slingshot's sixteen hundred metric tons, well over a thousand tons is engine.

Now you know why there aren't any space yachts flitting around out here. Slinger's one of the smallest ships in commission, and she's bloody big. If Jan and I hadn't happened to hit lucky by being the only possible buyers for a couple of wrecks, and hadn't had friends at Barclay's who thought we might make a go of it, we'd never have owned our own ship.

When I tell people about the engines, they don't ask what we do aboard Slinger when we're on long passages, but they're only partly right. You can't do anything to an engine while it's on. It either works or it doesn't, and all you have to do with it is see it gets fed.

It's when the damned things are shut down that the work starts, and that takes so much time that you make sure you've done everything else in the ship when you can't work on the engines. There's a lot of maintenance, as you might guess when you think that we've got to make everything we need, from air to zweiback. Living in a ship makes you appreciate planets.

Space operations go smooth, or generally they don't go at all.

When we were fifty kilometers behind, I cut the engines to minimum power. I didn't dare shut them down entirely. The fusion power system has no difficulty with restarts, but the ion screens are fouled if they're cooled. Unless they're cleaned or replaced we can lose as much as half our thrust—and we were going to need every dyne.

His face didn't change. "Experienced cadets, eh? Well, we'd best be down to it. Mr. Haply will show you what we've been able to accomplish."
They'd done quite a lot. There was a lot of expensive alloy bar-stock in the cargo, and somehow they'd got a good bit of it forward and used it to brace up the bows of the ship so she could take the thrust. "Haven't been able to weld it properly, though," Haply said. He was a young third engineer, not too long from being a cadet himself. "We don't have enough power to do welding and run the life support too."

Agamemnon's image was a blur on the screen across from my desk. It looked like a gigantic hydra, or a bullwhip with three short lashes standing out from the handle. The three arms rotated slowly. I pointed to it. "Still got spin on her."

"Yes." Ewert-James was grim. "We've been running the ship with that power. Spin her up with attitude jets and take power off the flywheel motor as she slows down."

I was impressed. Spin is usually given by running a big flywheel with an electric motor. Since any motor is a generator, Ewert-James's people had found a novel way to get some auxiliary power for life-support systems.

Agamemnon didn't look much like Slingshot. We'd closed to a quarter of a klick, and steadily drew ahead of her; when we were past her, we'd turn over and decelerate, dropping behind so that we could do the whole cycle over again.

Some features were the same, of course. The engines were not much larger than Slingshot's and looked much the same, a big cylinder covered over with tankage and coils, acceleration outports at the aft end. A smaller tube ran from the engines forward, but you couldn't see all of it because big rounded reaction mass canisters covered part of it.

Up forward the arms grew out of another cylinder. They jutted out at equal angles around the hull, three big arms to contain passenger decks and auxiliary systems. The arms could be folded in between the reaction mass canisters, and would be when we started boosting. All told she was over four hundred meters long, and with the hundred-meter arms thrust out she looked like a monstrous hydra slowly spinning in space.

The fuel transfer was tough. We couldn't just come alongside and winch the stuff over. At first we caught it on the fly: Agamemnon's crew would fling out hundred-ton canisters, then use the attitude jets to boost away from them, not far, but just enough to stand clear.

Then I caught them with the bow pod. It wasn't easy. You don't need much closing velocity with a hundred tons before you've got a hell of a lot of energy to worry about. Weightless doesn't mean massless.

We could only transfer about four hundred tons an hour that way. After the first ten-hour stretch I decided it wouldn't work. There were just too many ways for things to go wrong.

"Get rigged for tow," I told Captain Ewert-James. "Once we're hooked up I can feed you power, so you don't have to do that crazy stunt with the spin. I'll start boost at about a tenth of a centimeter. It'll keep the screens hot, and we can winch the fuel pods down."

He was ready to agree. I think watching me try to catch those fuel canisters, knowing that if I made a mistake his ship was headed for Saturn and beyond, was giving him ulcers.

First he spun her hard to build up power, then slowed the spin to nothing. The long arms folded alongside, so that Agamemnon took on a trim shape. Meanwhile I worked around in front of her, turned over and boosted in the direction we were traveling, and turned again.

The dopplers worked fine for a change. We hardly felt the jolt as Agamemnon settled nose to nose with us. Her crewmen came out to work the clamps and string lines across to carry power. We were linked, and the rest of the trip was nothing but hard work.

We could still transfer no more than four hundred tons an hour, meaning bloody hard work to get the whole twenty-five thousand tons into Slinger's fuel pod, but at least it was all downhill. Each canister was lowered by winch, then swung into our own fuel-handling system, where Singer's winches took over. Cadmium's heavy: a cube about two meters on a side holds a hundred tons of the stuff. It wasn't big, and it didn't weigh much in a tenth of a centimeter, but you don't drop the stuff either.

Finally it was finished, and we could start maximum boost: a whole ten centimeters, about a hundredth of a gee. That may not sound like much, but think of the mass involved. Slinger's sixteen hundred tons were nothing, but there was Agamemnon too. I worried about the bracing Ewert-James had put in the bows, but nothing happened.

Wayfarer

The Wayfarer is basically a stock Pilgrim Observer, all the way down to the NERVA engine. Except that the arms do not extend and rotate for artificial gravity.

Exiles To Glory

Their first impression was of a bundle of huge cigars. Those were the big fuel tanks almost a hundred meters long. They were so large that they dwarfed the rest of the ship, and ran the entire length of midsection. Behind the "cigars" was a solid ring that held three rocket motors. Then at the end of a spine as long as the main body of the ship was the nuclear reactor and another rocket motor.

This was the real drive. The three chemical rockets were only for steering and close maneuvering. Wayfarer's power came from her atomic pile. The cigar-shaped tanks held hydrogen, which was pumped back to the reactor where it was heated up and spewed out through the rear nozzle. A ring of heavy shielding just forward of the reactor kept the pile's radiation from getting to the crew compartment. The rest of the pile wasn't shielded at all.

Despite the large size of the ship, the crew and cargo sections seemed quite small. There were some structures reaching back from the forward ring where the control room was. Two of those were passenger quarters. The other was another nuclear power unit to make electricity to run the environmental control equipment, furnish light for the plants, power to reprocess air, and all the other things the ship and passengers and crew would need. There was a big telescope and a number of radar antennae on the forward section.

The scooter pilot was careful not to get near the reactor in the ship's "stinger."

The ship had been designed for sixty passengers. She carried twice that number plus eight crew.

The internal space was constructed in a series of circular decks. Each deck had an eight-foot hole in its center, so that from the forward end, just aft of the separately enclosed control cabin, Kevin could look all the way aft to the stern bulkhead. Although there was a long and rather flimsy-appearing steel ladder stretching from aft to forward bulkhead, no one used it.

"F deck," the crewman said "A deck is the bridge. B is the wardroom. C, D, and E are the three aft of that. E happens to be the recreation and environmental control. Yours is the one beyond that. They're marked."

Finally he reached F deck, which he found to be sectioned into slice-of-pie compartments arranged in a ring around the central well, fifteen of them in all. He found the one marked "12" and went in.

His "stateroom" was partitioned off with a flexible, bright blue material that Kevin thought was probably nylon. The door was of the same stuff and tied off
with strings. It didn't provide much privacy.

Inside the cramped quarters were facilities for two people. There were no bunks, but two blanket rolls strapped against the bulkhead indicated the sleeping arrangements. It made sense, Kevin thought. You didn't need soft mattresses in space. "Sleeping on a cloud" was literally true here. You needed straps to keep you from drifting away, but that was all.

One viewscreen with control console, a small worktable, and two lockers about the size of large briefcases completed the furnishings.

The incident reminded Kevin that he was in free fall, and his stomach didn't like it much. He gulped hard. "I'll be glad when we're under way," he said. "It won't last long, but it will be nice to have some weight again. Even for a day or so."

Norsedal frowned and rolled his eyes upward for a moment. "Not that long, I'm afraid," he said. "Let's see, total velocity change of about five kilometers a second, at a tenth of gravity acceleration—five thousand seconds." He took a pocket computer off his belt and punched numbers. "An hour and a half. Then we're back in zero-gravity."

Weight felt strange. The ship boosted at about ten percent of Earth's gravity, but Kevin found that quite enough. All over the ship loose objects fell to the decks.

Ninety minutes later the acceleration ended. Wayfarer was now in a long elliptical orbit that would cross the orbit of Ceres. Left to itself, the ship would go on past, more than halfway to Jupiter, before the Sun's gravity would finally turn it back to complete the ellipse and return it to its starting point. In order to land on Ceres, the ship would have to boost again when it got out to the orbit of the asteroid.

There would also be minor course-correction maneuvers during the trip, but except for those the ship's nuclear-pile engine wouldn't be started up until they arrived at Ceres's orbit. Then the ship would accelerate to catch up with the asteroid. That wouldn't happen for nine months.

The heart of the system was a series of large transparent tanks filled with green water and tropical fish. Once Wayfarer was under way the crew erected large mirrors outside the hull. The mirrors collected sunlight and focused it through Plexiglas viewports onto the algae tanks. A ventilation system brought the ship's air into the tanks as a stream of bubbles. Other pumping systems collected sewage and forced it into chemical processors; the output was treated sewage that went to the algae tanks as fertilizer.

Wayfarer had two airlocks. One was right in the bows, a large docking port that allowed smaller space capsules to link up with the ship, and could also be used to link with an airtight corridor connecting the ship with the Ceres spaceport, or even with another ship. The other was a smaller personnel lock on the side of the hull just aft of the bows. Kevin and Ellen went out that way. There was a small ladder leading forward. It wasn't needed as a ladder, but it provided handholds.

The telescope was large, over a foot in diameter, with flexible seals that let it pass through the ship's hull and into the control bridge.

The ship's engines started. There was no sound and no flame. Hydrogen was pumped from the tanks and into the nuclear pile on its sting at the end of the ship. The nuclear reactor heated the hydrogen and forced it back through nozzles. The ship drove forward at a tenth of a gravity.

From Exiles to Glory by Jerry Pournelle (1977)

Medici Explorer

The Weight

(ed note: the Medici Explorer is basically the Pilgrim Observer with the NERVA solid core NTR swapped out for a gas-core NTR)

The Medici Explorer was fifty-six meters in length, from the gunmetal-grey nozzle of its primary engine to the grove of antennae and telescopes mounted on its barrel-shaped hub module; at the tips of its three arms—which were not yet rotating—the spacecraft was about forty-six meters in diameter. Pale blue moonlight reflected dully from the tube-shaped hydrogen, oxygen, and water tanks clustered in tandem rows between the hub and the broad, round radiation shield at the stern. Extended on a slender boom aft of the shield, behind the three gimbal-mounted maneuvering engines, was the gas-core nuclear engine, held at safe distance from the crew compartments at the forward end of the vessel. Although the reactor stack in Arm Three was much closer to the hub, it was heavily shielded and could not harm the crew when it was in operation.

The Medici Explorer was already awake and thriving. Two days earlier, it had departed from Highgate, the lunar-orbit spacedock where it had been docked since the completion of its last voyage six months ago. During the interim, while its crew rested at Descartes City and the precious cargo of Jovian helium-3 was unloaded from the freighters and transported to Earth, the Medici Explorer had undergone the routine repairs necessary before it could make its next trip to Jupiter. Now, at long last, the giant spacecraft had been towed by tugs to a higher orbit where it was reunited with its convoy.

The shuttle made its final approach toward the vessel’s primary docking collar on the hub module. On the opposite side of the docking collar, anchored to a truss which ran through a narrow bay between the outboard tanks, was the Marius, a smaller spacecraft used for landings. The fact that the ship’s boat was docked with the larger vessel was evidence that the Medici Explorer’s crew had returned from shore leave; more proof could be seen from the lights which glowed from the square windows of Arm One and Arm Two.

Red and blue navigational beacons arrayed along the superstructure illuminated more details: an open service panel on the hub where a robot was making last-minute repairs; a hardsuited space worker checking for micrometeorite damage to the hull; the round emblem of Consolidated Space Industries, the consortium which owned the vessel, painted on the side of the hub. Then the shuttle slowly yawed starboard, exposing its airlock hatch to the docking collar, and the Medici Explorer drifted away from its windows.

So on and so forth, barely pausing for breath, as we dropped down the hub’s access shaft to the carousel which connects the hub to the ship’s three arms. Since the arms were not presently rotating, we didn’t need to make the tricky maneuver of reorienting ourselves until the appropriate hatchway swung past us. The carousel’s hatches were aligned with their appropriate arms, so all we had to do was squirm through the upward-bending corridor—passing the sealed tiger-striped hatch which led to the reactor stack in Arm Three—until we reached the open hatch marked Arm 1.

The arm’s central shaft resembled a deep well, fifteen meters straight down to the bottom. Although I consciously knew that I couldn’t fall in zero-gee, I instinctively rebelled at the thought of throwing myself into a neck-breaking plummet. While I paused at the edge of the hatch, still visually disoriented by the distance, Young Bill dove headfirst through the hatch, scarcely grabbing the rungs of the ladder which led down the blue-carpeted wall of the shaft. I shut my eyes for a moment, fighting a surge of nausea, then I eased myself feet-first into the shaft, carefully taking each rung a step at a time.

There were six levels in Arm One, each accessed by the long ladder. Still babbling happily about rain forests and South American Indian tribes, Young Bill led me past Level 1-A (the infirmary and life sciences lab) Level 1-B (the Smith-Tate residence), Level 1-C (Smith-Makepeace) and Level 1-D (Smith-Tanaka). The hatches to each deck were shut, but as we glided past Level 1-D, its hatch opened and a preadolescent boy recklessly rushed out into the shaft and almost collided with Young Bill.

Young Bill shut the hatch, then led me down one more level to Deck 1-E, the passenger quarters.

He opened the hatch to Deck 1-E and pulled himself inside, hauling my duffel bag behind him. The deck was divided into four passenger staterooms, along with a common bathroom; not surprisingly, it was marked Head, retaining the old nautical term. The small compartment Bill led me to had its own foldaway bed, desk, data terminal and screen, along with a wide square window through which I could see the Moon.

Don’t bother making yourself at home,” he said as he stowed my duffel bag in a closet. “After we launch, you won’t see this place again for nine months.”

I nodded. “The other passengers… they’re already in hibernation?”

Yep. I helped Uncle Yoshi dope ’em up a few hours ago. They’re zombified already. You’ll be joining them after we—”

Control center

The Medici Explorer’s command center was shaped like the inside of a Chinese wok. Located on the top deck of the hub, Deck H-1 was the largest single compartment in the vessel: about fifteen meters in diameter, the bridge had a sloping, dome-shaped ceiling above a shallow, tiered pit. Two observation blisters, each containing an optical telescope, were mounted in the ceiling at opposite ends of the pit; between them were myriad computer flat-screens and holographic displays, positioned above the duty stations arranged around the circumference of the pit. In the center of the bridge, at the bottom of the pit between and slightly below the duty stations, was the captain’s station, a wingback chair surrounded by wraparound consoles. On one side of the bridge was the hatch leading to the hub’s access tunnel; on the opposite side was a small alcove, a rest area furnished with three chairs and a small galley.

It may sound claustrophobic and technocratic, but the bridge was actually quite spacious and comfortable. The floors were carpeted, allowing one to comfortably walk on them provided that one was wearing stikshoes, and the holoscreens provided a variety of scenes from outboard cameras as well as the main telescope, giving the illusion of cathedral windows looking out upon the grand cosmos.

The major technological breakthrough which made Jupiter reachable was made in 2028 by a joint R&D project by Russian and American physicists at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: the development of a gas-core nuclear engine, resulting in an impulse-per-second engine thrust ratio twice as high as even the thermal-fission engines used by Mars cycleships.

Astrotug

He went out in the ship’s service bug, a tiny gumdrop-shaped vehicle with double-jointed RWS arms, used for in-flight repair operations. Bill had been thoroughly trained and checked out for the bug; indeed, this was the third time he had piloted it during a flight. While Betsy, his dad, and Saul monitored from the bridge, he took the bug out from its socket on the hub, jetted around the ship’s rotating arms, and gently maneuvered the little one-person craft until he reached the maneuvering engines behind the radiation shield.

From The Weight by Allen Steele (1995)

Pilgrim Observer Roots

When creating the Pilgrim Observer, G. Harry Stine started with a 1960's study on creating a self deploying space station. Mr. Stine added the propellant tanks and the NERVA NTR to make it into a spacecraft. You will note the box cover says "Space Station", not "Spacecraft". David Portree identified the space station study in question. Actually studies plural, the Pilgrim was based on an amalgam of several.

David Portree said the design below is from an NASA Manned Spacecraft Center team under Owen Maynard and dates from 1962. The pressurized cabins and the access tubes are covered with a meteor bumper for protection (0.99 probability of not more than one penetration per month).

GE came up with a modified 35-kw SNAP-8 power system for this design in 9/64. They looked at placing the reactor at the center of rotation, down below the hub, or at the end of one of the arms. Oddly enough (from a balance standpoint), they favored placing the reactor at the end of one of the arms. I think they did this because the nadir surface of the hub was supposed to carry Earth-observation instruments.

You will notice that locating the reactor in one of the arms was copied in the design for the Pilgrim. This is foolish, since unlike the space station the Pilgrim has no Earth-observation instruments on its nadir surface. As a matter of fact, the Pilgrim already has a reactor on its nadir, inside the NERVA.

If was to re-design the Pilgrim Observer, I would not waste an entire rotating arm on the reactor. Instead I'd make the NERVA into a Bimodal NTR, and use the third arm for extra labs or something. The NERVA is not going to be thrusting during the months the ship coasts, so it might as well do something useful. The Bimodal switch would require the addition of some heat radiators, a turbine, a generator, and a condensor, but that should not be hard to incorporate.

However, the fact that the Pilgrim also had the reactor in one of the arms is yet more proof it was copied from the design of this space station.

The 150 foot diameter of the rotating section is the same figure quoted in the Pilgrim plastic model booklet. The Pilgrim however only rotated at 2 rpm, instead of 4 rpm. The patent #3300162 specfied 3 rpm (citing the spin nausea limit). Take your pick.

In the pressurized cabin, each level had an internal floor to ceiling height of 84 inches, an external deck to deck spacing of 100 inches, and the floor had a diameter of 183 inches.

The patent notes that the advantage of the folding arms is that when the station is boosted into orbit the direction of acceleration is the same as when the arms are spinning. This means that the cargo does not shift. I'm sure G. Harry Stine noted that thrust can occur in a deep space exploration ship as well as a station being boosted into orbit.

The first radial, integral-launch space station was based on some ideas of H. Kurt Strass at Langley Research Center about November 1961 and designed by Willard M. Taub at Manned Spacecraft Center in June 1962 for Charles W. Mathews. Later, it became known as the foldable Y-shaped space station. History of NASA

Note twin airlocks on the ends of the arms. These are the ends of two long access tubes that flank the cylindrical pressurized cabin in the center. Keep in mind that due to the artificial gravity, "down" is the direction away from the center of the station. This means the airlocks are like hang-man trap doors that open up to a long drop.

MMSS launch and arm deployment. It is important that the axis points at the Sun, so that the solar panels on the arms get maximum sunlight. MMSS Study

Inside each cabin, nothing will ever be placed against the wall. The crew must be able to reach the wall at all times in order to repair meteor punctures. Of course in all the latter diagrams there is all sorts of stuff snug against the wall. MMSS Study

Six cabin modules are stacked to make the pressurized cabin for one spoke. Total height 50 feet. About 53,000 pounds empty, about 82,000 pounds loaded with cabling, lab equipment, life support and everything else. The bottom most levels are for crew quarters with the highest gravity. The low gravity upper levels are for storage. MMSS Study

There are three bunks. Each bunk has three beding rolls. This is for the "hot-bunk" system, where a trio of people share the same bunk in different shifts. In other words, this room is the sleeping area for nine people. MMSS Study

NASA 3-armed station (1962). Green is pressurized cabin. Yellow is access tube. Blue is floors. Gold is connecting tubes. Light green is annular passageway. Orange is airlocks. Magenta is rotating pressure seal. Each compartment has its floor curved according to the radius of rotation. Access tubes flanking cylindrical cabin create oval outline. Note that the access tubes end in airlocks extending outside of the arms. In each arm, one access tube will have a continuous ladder, the other a conveyer system to transport bulk equipment. Note that supporting the pressurized cabin from two access tubes provides more structural rigidity than the single tube used by the Pilgrim Observer. Manned Orbital Operation

US Patent #3300162 RADIAL MODULE SPACE STATION. Pale blue are solar panels, pale cyan are the portions of the boost vehicles outer hull covering each arm during lift-off. Note hull only covers top of arm, not the bottom. Pale green is central room, this corresponds to the "annular passageway" in the other design.

This version has an overall radius of 95 feet, the MSC version has an overall radius of 75 feet.
Spokes are fixed to the hub, they cannot rotate while the hub remains stationary, as in the plastic model. However, if they did, the problem of transferring electrical power to a spinning spoke through a stationary hub is avoided by giving each spoke its own solar panel array. Each of the three arms has enough solar panels to obtain 10 kilowatts.

US Patent #3300162 RADIAL MODULE SPACE STATION. Peach color is zero-G lab, it is reverse rotated by a motor to counteract centrifugal gravity. Pale green is equivalent to the "annular passageway", it is not annular because this design does not have a passageway down the middle for spacecraft to exit. Instead spacecraft exit the same way they entered: through the hatch at the top. Set of #74s are airtight hatches between the yellow access tubes and the pale green central room. Hatches are surrounded by the rotating seals, station arms pivot around this point. Note quad jet at bottom of green pressurized cabin, very similar to jet on bottom of reactor stack in Pilgrim plastic model.

Project Orion

Project Orion sets the mark by which all other propulsion systems are measured, in the category of OMG! That's bat-poop insane! You have GOT to be joking!.

It is like a naughty little boy lighting a firecracker under a tin can. Except the tin can is a spaceship and the firecracker is a nuclear warhead.

But before you hurt yourself sputtering with indignation, be told that not only would the accursed thing work, but it is the closest thing to a torchship that we could actually build.

You know my slogan Every Gram Counts? Not with this monster. Unlike almost every other rocket, Orion does not scale down worth a darn. It actually works better if you make it bigger! The Saturn V had enough delta V to send about 118 metric tons to Luna and back. A 1959 Orion design could send 1,300 freaking tons to Saturn and back! Instead of miserly trying to shave off grams from your rocket by things like omitting the Lunar Module's astronaut chairs, the Orion was talking about bringing along 100 kg Barber Chairs just in case any of the astronauts needed a shave.

The fly in the ointment is that Orion works best to boost outrageous payloads from the surface into orbit. Which is exactly what makes the anti-nuclear crowd go hysterical. Once in orbit, there are other propulsion systems with better specific impulse / exhaust velocity. But when it comes to huge thrust and huge specific impulse, Orion is near the top. A pity the limited nuclear test ban treaty killed the Orion dead.

No, Orion does not make tons of deadly radioactive fallout. If you launch from an armor plated pad covered in graphite there will be zero fallout. And No, it would not create the apocalyptic horror of EMP making the world's cell phones explode and wiping out the Internet. That's only a problem with one megaton nukes, the Orion's charges are only a few kilotons. Just launch from near the North Pole (at least 276 kilometers from anything electronic) and you'll be fine.

But if the truth must be known, anybody who is freaking out about the concept of Orion is only doing so because they never heard about Zubrin's nuclear salt water rocket, which is a million times worse. Orion just goes bang...bang...bang. Zubrin's NSWR is a blasted continuously detonating nuclear explosion!

Please note that Orion drive is pretty close to being a torchship, and is not subject to the Every gram counts rule. It is probably the only torchship we have the technology to actually build today.

If you want the real inside details of the original Orion design, run, do not walk, and get a copies the following issues of of Aerospace Projects Review:
Volume 1, Number 4, Volume 1, Number 5, and Volume 2, Number 2. They have blueprints, tables, and lots of never before seen details.

If you want your data raw, piled high and dry, here is a copy of report GA-5009 vol III "Nuclear Pulse Space Vehicle Study - Conceptual Vehicle Design" by General Atomics (1964). Lots of charts, lots of graphs, some very useful diagrams, almost worth skimming through it just to admire the diagrams.

The following table is from a 1959 report on Orion, and is probably a bit optimistic. But it makes for interesting reading. Note that 4,000 tons is pretty huge. The 10-meter Orion (the one in all the "Orion" illustrations) is only about 500 tons.

In other words, if you can believe their figures, the advanced Orion could carry a payload of 1,300 tons(NOT kilograms) to Enceladus and back!

Most of the information and images in this section are from Aerospace Project Review vol 1 no 5. I am only giving you a "Cliff Notes" executive summary of the information, and only a few of the images and those in low resolution. If you want the real deal, get a copy of APR v1n5.

Orion drive spacecraft scale up quite easily. However, unlike other propulsion systems, they do not scale down gracefully. Surprisingly it is much more of an engineering challenge to make a small Orion. It is difficult to make a nuclear explosive below a certain yield in kilotons, and small nuclear explosives waste most of their uranium or plutonium. But it is relatively easy to make them as huge as you want, just pile on the megatons.

Alas for General Atomic, neither the United States Air Force (USAF) nor NASA wanted it. USAF had no need for a ship sized for being a space going battleship (they thought they did but President Kennedy smacked them down). NASA wanted nothing to do with a spacecraft that would make the Saturn V and its infrastructure obsolete and pitifully inadequate overnight. So General Atomic heaved a big sigh, and started designing a tiny Orion drive craft with only a 10 meter diameter pusher plate.

However, recently declassified documents reveal that the USAF's decision to cancel plans for the 4000 ton Orion was a near thing. If some of the high-ranking USAF officers had slightly different personalties, today there would be a US Space Force with Orion spacecraft sending expeditions to Enceladus.

Since General Atomic was trying to sell the design to a couple of organizations with vastly different missions in mind, GA made the design modular. There was a basic propulsion system that one could attach any number of different payloads, and customizing the amount of propellant was as easy as stacking poker chips.

In this section we will be focusing on the USAF design. After the USAF lost interest, General Atomic started working with NASA to customize the Orion to their needs. This made the NASA design quite different from the USAF design. NASA was losing intererest even before the partial test-ban treaty of 1963 killed the Orion dead.

The USAF 10M Orion had three main components: the Orion Drive propulsion module, the stacks of magazines containing the nuclear pulse units (the Propellant), and the Payload Stack.

The Propulsion Module containes the cannon firing the nuclear pulse charges. It also has the massive array of shock absorbers allowing the spacecraft to absorb the nuclear explosion without being crushed like a bug. It also contains 138 "starter" nuclear pulse units. These are half strength units used to initiate a period of acceleration.

The Magazine Stack holds the (full-strength) nuclear pulse units. Each magazine holds 60 units. There are six magazines in a layer, holding 360 units. This design can hold up to ten layers depending upon how much delta V it needs, but if it has an odd number of magazines they must be balanced around the thrust axis. A full load of ten layers contains 3,600 pulse units.

The Payload stack has three components: Powered Flight Station, Personnel Accommodations, and the Basic 12-Meter Spine.

The Spine rests on the propulsion module and has the magazine stack frame attached. The spine contains the spare parts, the repair shack, and mission specific payload. Some of the mission payload is attached outside the spine, such as the Mars Lander.

On top of the spine is the Personnel Accomodations. This holds the life support, the crew quarters, laboratories, and workshops.

On top of the Accomodations is the Powered Flight Station. This contains the anti-radiation storm cellar, which contains the flight controls used when the ship is accelerating (since exploding nuclear bombs make radiation). In an emergency, the entire section can turn into a large escape life-boat rocket and fly away from the rest of the spacecraft. The life-boat has about 600 m/s of delta V and enough life support to keep the 8 person crew alive for 90 days.

Note that in the table the mission specific payload is not included. The more of that which is added, the lower becomes the delta V.

Nuclear Pulse Unit

Nuclear Pulse Unit

Container andelectronic mass

6.9 kg

Nuclear devicemass

72.1 kg

Total mass

79 kg

Diameter

0.36 m

Height

0.6 m

Yield

1 kt

Propellantper pulse

34.3 kg

Thrustper pulse

2.0×106 N

Specific Impulse

3,350 seconds

Exhaust velocity

32,900 m/s

Detonationinterval

0.8 to 1.5 sec0.86 sec is std

The USAF nuclear pulse units are atom bombs. They were about 0.6 meters tall, had a mass of 79 kilograms, produced a 1 kiloton nuclear explosion, and produced 2.0×106 Newtons of force per pulse unit. They were basically nuclear shaped charges. 80% of the blast was focused on the pusher plate instead of being wastefully sprayed everywhere.

The latter NASA pulse units had more mass, more Newtons of force, but a lower specific impulse.

The propulsion system also carries 138 "starter" nuclear pulse units. These are half-strength (1.0×106), used to start a period of acceleration. A starter pulse is used on a stationary pusher plate, a full strength pulse is used on a pusher plate in motion. The first shot will be a starter pulse, and the remaining pulses will be full-strength for the rest of the acceleration period.

You see, a half-strength push is enough to push the plate from the neutral position up to the fully compressed position. A full-strength push is enough to stop a plate moving downward and start it moving upward. Using a full-strength push on a stationary plate will give it twice as much as it need, driving the pusher hard into the body of the spacecraft and gutting it like a trout.

Naturally if one of the full-strength units misfires, the pilot will wait for the pusher plate to settle down then start anew with a fresh half-strength unit.

The layer of tungsten propellant should be as thin as possible. However, there are limits to how wide it can be (or a pulse unit will have an inconveniently large diametr) and it should be thick enough to stop most of the neutron and gamma radiation (to reduce the radiation exposure on the ship in general and the neutron activation on the propulsion module in particular). The mass ratio of the tungsten propellant to the beryllium oxide channel filler should be about 4:1.

Each unit had two copper bands, that are bitten into by the rifling of the cannon that shoots these little darlings. The rifling spins the pulse units like rifle bullets, for gyro-stabilization.

Pulse unit for the later NASA Orion. It had a higher thrust (3.5×106 N) but lower specific impulse (1,850 sec). Probably means the propellant is heavier.

Magazine Stack

Magazine Stack

Empty magazine

181 kg

Single pulse unit

79 kg

Pulse unitsin magazine

60

Total pulseunit

4740 kg

Loaded magazine

4,921 kg

1 stack layer(6 magazines)

29,526 kg

Pulse unitsin 1 stack layer

360

Full stack(10 stack layers)

294,260 kg

Pulse unitsin full stack

3,600

Pulse units were packaged in disk shaped magazines, 60 nukes per magazines. The magazines were stacked like poker chips on top of the propulsion module, held in a hexagonal truss. There are six stacks, with a maximum height of 10 magazines.

The bottom six magazines attach directly to the propulsion module's feed system. The open end of a magazine fits onto one of the propulsion module's six "pulse system conveyors". On the magazine, a slot in the side called a "sprocket opening" allowed one of the propulsion system's sprockets to be inserted into the magazine. As it spins, the star-shaped sprocket grabs the next pulse unit and feeds it into the pulse system conveyor. From there the pulse system travels deep inside the propulsion module to the launch position.

Pulse units are drawn simultaneously from the bottom six magazines. "Bottom" because that is the layer which attaches to the propulsion system's pulse system conveyor. "Simultaneously" because you do not want the spacecraft's center of gravity straying from the thrust axis. Those pulse units are heavy, and they do not automatically redistribute the mass like fluid propellant in a tank.

When the bottom six magazines are empty (360 pulse units expended), propulsion is momentarily halted, and the six "ejection actuators" (pistons) push on the ejection pad of their respective empty magazine and catapult the empty into space. Sort of like flicking a bottle-cap off the bar room table with your finger. The "stack drive pinions" then engage the racks on the magazine stack and lower the entire stack down until it engages the propulsion system's pulse system conveyor. Propulsion is restarted.

Note the "rack", the "ejection pad", and the "sprocket opening"

Note the "rack"

Note "stack drive pinions", the "ejection actuators", the "pulse system conveyor", and the "sprockets"

The propulsion module is build around a compressed gas cannon that fires nuclear pulse units downward through a hole in the pusher plate. Once the pulse unit reaches a point 25 meters below the pusher plate, the it detonates. The shaped charge channels the explosion into a 22.5° cone perfectly covering the pusher plate.

Since premature detonation of a pulse unit would probably utterly destroy the entire spacecraft, there are incredibly stringent controls on them. The units are locked into safe mode and as such are as impossible to detonate as the designers can possibly make them. Otherwise no astronaut is going to set foot inside a spacecraft carrying enough nuclear warheads to totally vaporize the entire thing. 3.6 megatons is nothing to sniff at.

If everything is nominal, the arming signal is transmitted to a launched unit when it approaches the 25 meter detonation point. If the engine control computer determines that the synchronization between the pusher, the shock-absorber system, and the pulse unit are within tolerances; the detonation signal is sent when the unit arrives at the detonation point.

If anything is wrong, the computer instead transmits the "safety" signal and the unit enter safe mode again. When the pulse unit is a safe distance away, the computer sends a destruct signal. You don't want unattended nuclear explosives just flying through space.

If the computer sends the standard detonation signal but the pulse unit fails to do so, it is automatically disarmed (we hope). Again the destruct signal is sent once the unit is safely away, hopefully the unit will oblige. But since the unit has already failed to detonation on command once already, something is obviously wrong with it. Whether it will actually disarm then destruct is anybody's guess.

It goes without saying that the various pulse unit radio signals will be heavily encryped to prevent sabotage. Especially if the spacecraft in question is a military vessel. Otherwise an enemy ship could send the detionation code to every single pulse unit on board, and cackle as your ship did its impression of a supernova.

Because the pusher plate has a hole in the center, part of the blast will sneak through and torch the business end of the cannon. The cannon has a plasma deflector cone (with 1.27 centimeters of armor) on the end to protect it. When a pulse unit emerges from the cannon, the deflector cone opens for a split second to let it out. The deflector cone has its own tiny shock absorbers, of course. The rest of the conical base of the propulsion module is also armored, since the deflector cone will be deflecting plasma all over the base.

When the blast hits the pusher plate it gives thrust to the spacecraft, like a nuclear powered boot kicking you in the butt at 32 kilometers per second. To prevent this thrust from flattening the ship like a used beer can, two stages of shock absorbers do their best to smooth out the slam.

The first stage is a stack of inflated flexible tubes on top of the pusher plate. It takes the 50,000 g of acceleration and reduces the peak acceleration to a level that can be handled by a rigid structure. Such as the second stage shock absorbers.

The second stage is a forest of linear shock absorbers. They reduce the peak acceleration further to only a few gs.

The structural frame is welded out of T-1 steel I-beams to take the jolt and transfer the thrust from the shock absorbers to the payload. A set of six torus tanks pressurizes the linear shock absorbers and lubricates their interiors with large amounts of grease. You need that grease, those linear shock absorbers are working real hard. If one seizes up the results will be ... unfortunate.

In between blasts the inflatable first stage shock absorbers oscillates through 4.5 cycles (no doubt making a silent sad cartoon accordion noise), while the second stage absorbers go through one half cycle. The first stage oscillates between being 0.6 normal height to 1.4 height.

As each pulse unit is fired, a fine spray of ablative silicone oil coats the pusher plate to help it survive the blast. With the oil coating, each nuclear charge raises the temperature of the plate by only 0.07° Celsius. Typically acceleration periods use only 1,000 pulse units at a time, which would raise the pusher plate temperature by only 70° C.

The effective thrust is the thrust-per-pulse divided by the detonation interval. So 2.0×106 / 0.8 = 2.5×106 N effective thrust. This means a series of nuclear bombs going off every 4/5ths of a second. Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom!

The compressed gas cannon uses ammonia (NH3), stored in the "gas collector and mixing tank". This is the top-most of the torus (donut) shaped tanks around the core. The tank holds about 8 metric tons of ammonia, and 2 kilograms are used for each shot. Which means the tank is good for about 4,000 shots. A full set of magazine stacks + the start and restart pulse system has 3,600 + 138 = 3,738 total pulse units so this should be ample. If more ammonia is needed, there is room to spare inside the propulsion system. Alternatively extra ammonia tanks could be stored inside the Basic Spine.

The cannon barrel is 12 meters long, aimed straight down. The cannon accelerates the pulse unit at 45 g giving them a velocity of 90 meters per second. The barrel is rifled to spin the pulse unit at 5 rps. When the nuclear charge reaches the 8 meter point inside the barrel, exhaust manifolds frantically try to suck out all the ammonia gas and spit it out the ejector gas exhaust tubes. The idea was to have no ammonia between the pusher plate and the detonating nuclear charge. The shaped charge blast could accelerate the ammonia and damage the pusher plate.

The main source of nuclear pulse units is from the magazines stacked on top of the propulsion module. However, the module carries 138 pulse units internally in its "start and restart pulse system." They are stored at the top of the module in six curving channels holding 23 pulse units apiece. These are special half-strength pulse units (0.5 kt, 1×106N). They are used as the first shot for engine start or in the event of a regular pulse unit misfire. A half-strength unit is used on a stationary pusher plate, a full strength unit is used on a pusher plate in motion.

Cannon is gas collector & mixing tank + gas measuring tank & admission valve + ejector tube + ejector gas exhaust + plasma deflector cone (red).
Regular pulse system conveyor at top right attaches to a magazine (blue)
The start & restart system storage conveyor is at the top left, internal (blue)
The first-stage shock absorbers are at the bottom on top of the pusher plate (green)
The second-stage shock absorbers are the columns rising from the pusher plate (green). They are pressurized and lubricated by the six coolant & anti-ablation oil tanks

Focus is on the gas cannon and the two pulse system storage and conveyors.
Start & restart pulse storage is at upper left, contains half-charges for beginning an acceleration period.
Magazine and pulse system conveyor is at upper right, with magazine resting on top of propulsion module.
Ammonia gas from gas collector & mixing tank travels up tube to gas measuring tank at breech of gas cannon. The gas admission valve fires the cannon, allowing the ammonia to propel the pulse unit down the ejector tube. At 8 meters down, the ammonia is removed by the ejector gas exhaust so it does not vent out of the end of the cannon. The plasma deflection cone opens for 0.2 seconds to allow the pulse unit to exit the muzzle of the cannon.

Note pusher oil spray coating bottom of pusher plate with ablative silicone oil
At bottom when pulse unit reaches the point "ARM" a radio signal readies the unit for detonation. A second signal triggers detonation at the 25 meter point, hopefully. If the unit is a dud, when it reaches the point "DISARM" a third radio signal turns on the safety.

Top view of section A-A
The start & restart pulse system storage and conveyor holds the half-strength pulse units and delivers them to the breech chamber at top of gas cannon, moved by the sprocket drive.

Dimensions for Mode I operation (chemical booster lofts Orion to 90 km, Orion then uses high acceleration to climb into LEO).

Mode I operation (chemical booster lofts Orion to 90 km, Orion then uses high acceleration to climb into LEO). Shown are acceleration 1.0g, 0.8g, and 0.6g

Mode II operation (chemical booster lofts empty Orion with minimum pulse units to 90 km, Orion then uses high acceleration to climb into LEO, chemical boosters loft supplies and full load of pulse units to orbiting Orion). Unlikely to be used since has disadvantages of both Mode I and Mode III and none of the advantages.

Since General Atomic was trying to market the 10 meter Orion to both the USAF and NASA, they made it modular instead of integrated. That way they could have a common propulsion system for both, with customized payload stacks for each. The example payload stack shown here is for a Mars mission. A chemical rocket using a Hohmann trajectory would take at least nine months to travel to Mars. But the Orion drive rocket could go to Mars and back in four months flat! However the mission that General Atomic finally settled on was a more pedestrian fifteen month mission requiring only 22.2 km/s of delta V. This would only need a mass ratio of 1.93. If my slide rule is not lying to me, this means it needs about 2149 pulse units (36 magazines or 6 layer magazine stack).

All the payload stacks started with a Basic 12-Meter Spine at the bottom, resting on the top of the propulsion module with the magazine supports tied to it. In the Mars mission, this contained the space parts and the repair shack.

On top of the Basic Spine was the Personnel Accommodations. This contains the life support system, crew living quarters, and laboratories.

At the very top is the Powered Flight Station. This contains the anti-radiation storm cellar. The crew shelters inside in case of space radiation storms. The crew also shelters inside while the Orion drive is operating, since a series of nuclear detonations is also very radioactive. This is why the flight deck is located inside. Finally the entire level can detach and turn into an emergency life boat if something catastrophic happens to the main ship.

Usually you have a 10-meter propulsion module topped with a Basic 12-m Spine, topped with an 8-crew Personnel Accomodation, topped with an 8-crew Powered Flight Station.

However it is possible to replace the last two items with a 20-crew Personnel Accomodation topped with a 20-crew Powered Flight Station. The 20-crew Accomodation needs its base modified to attach to the Basic Spine, it was originally designed to attach to the larger diameter spine of a 20-meter propulsion module.

Since the spacecraft is long and skinny, it uses the "tumbling pigeon" method of artificial gravity. This is where the spacecraft rotates end over end, at four revolutions per minute. For a 50 meter long spacecraft this would give about 0.45 g at the tip of the nose, gradually diminishing to zero at the point where the basic spine joins the propulsion module. The amount of gravity will change as pulse units are expended, thus shifting the center of gravity, rotation point, and rotation radius.

This does pose a problem in the internal arrangement. While under acceleration the direction of "down" is towards the pusher plate. But while tumbling, the direction of "down" is where the nose of the ship is pointing. So if you are standing on the "floor" during acceleration, when it switches over to tumbling you will find yourself falling "upwards" and end up standing on the ceiling.

As it turns out, if the ship is accelerating it also means that everybody is huddling inside the storm cellar (or dying of radiation poisoning). Therefore the storm cellar is built with "pusher-plate is down" orientation, and the rest of the ship is build with "nose is down" orientation.

This also means that the entire mission payload stack has to have a structure that can handle tension as well as compression.

This section contains the flight controls and the reaction control system. The unshielded point at the top is the navigation station. The unshielded room below is full of the emergency supplies.

Since this is the section farthest from the detonating nuclear pulse units, it makes sense to locate the anti-radiation storm cellar here. In the diagram it is the rooms inside the thick radiation shielding. You get extra protection via the inverse square law at no cost in shield mass. The radiation created by operating the Orion drive is also the reason why all the flight controls are located inside the storm cellar. Otherwise the pilots will be forced to be at flight controls during flight which are located inside the deadly radioactive flux from the drive, making it impossible to recruit Orion drive pilots. The storm cellar will also be used in case of solar proton storms.

It is unwise to put holes in the part of the radiation shield protecting the crew from the pulses, radiation will spray through. This is why access to the Flight Station is from the sides not the bottom, via two pressurized passageways attached laterally. The right hand passageway is attached to an airlock in the emergency supply room, and just has a pressure-tight hatch down at the Personnel Accommodation module, at the other end. The left hand passageway is attached to a pressure-tight door on the Propulsion Control center, and has a full airlock down at the Personnel Accommodation module.

The main radiation shield on the "floor" is composed of 55 grams per square centimeter of lead. Below that is 120 g/cm2 of hydrogenous material, probably water. The side walls and ceiling have 25 g/cm2 of water to protect against backscatter. There actually is some extra protection inside each pulse unit in the form of the channel filler and propellant. The estimate was that the shield would keep the crew exposure down to 0.5 Sievert from the Orion drive, and 0.5 Sieverts from solar flares, for a total of 1.0 Sievert per Mars mission. More recent analysis shows that only 0.5 Sieverts from solar flares is a bit optimistic.

The storm cellar will also have lots of fiberglas sound-proofing. The tungsten propellant striking the pusher plate will make a tremendously huge noise, transmitted by conduction to the entire spacecraft. From freqencies of 7,000 cps to 50 cps the noise will be about 100 to 140 decibels. Without sound-proofing it will damage the hearing of the crew members.

The Flight Station can also detach to become an emergency lifeboat if catastrophe strikes the main ship. It has about 600 m/s of delta V and about 90 days worth of life support for the 8 crew members. Part of the floor radiation shield is from the emergency rocket fuel tanks. A bank of solid rocket booster ejects the Flight Station, and liquid rockets are used for maneuvers. The RCS is already a part of this module.

There was some analysis about angling the nuclear pulse units slightly off-center instead of using a RCS, but thankfully cooler heads prevailed.

Powered flight station for 10 meter Orion, can carry 8 crew

Powered flight station for 20 meter Orion, can carry 20 crew.

Powered flight station for 20 meter Orion, can carry 20 crew

Personnel Accommodation

8 CrewPersonnel AccommodationOperational Payload Mass

Structural Mass

7,600 kg

Furnishings

2,400 kg

Main power supply

3,470 kg

Guidance &navigationrepeaters

3 kg

Communicationrepeater

1 kg

Spin gravity systemtankage & nozzles

386 kg

Spin Propellant

4,540 kg

Life Support

2,977 kg

Life Supportconsumables

3,515 kg

Reserve Life Support

1,170 kg

Food Supply

5,398 kg

x4 Space Taxi

625 kg

x4 Space Taxi Propellant

825 kg

Crew (8)

725 kg

Contingency (~5%)

3,315 kg

Total OperationalPayload Mass

36,950 kg

General Dynamics 2-Man Space Taxi

Propulsion

Chemical

Specific Impulse

450 s

Exhaust Velocity

4,500 m/s

Wet Mass

361 kg

Dry Mass

155 kg

Propellant Mass

206 kg

Mass Ratio

2.3

ΔV

3,750 m/s

Crew

2

Height

3.5 m

This section contains crew living quarters, the main power supply, repeaters for the navigation instruments and communication gear in the Powered flight station, the tumbling pigeon jets, the life support system, and the food.

If there were several Orion vessels in the mission they would have space taxis, since trying to maneuver and dock with an Orion Drive is like trying to thread a needle with a bulldozer.

Since this is an Orion drive and not every gram counts, this section is built solid. The decks are pressure-tight bulkheads, not non-pressure tight walls. Compartments are accessed via airlocks, so a space suited crew member can enter an area that was vented by a meteor strike without killing everybody. The two passageways at the top lead to the Powered Flight Station above. The left hand passageway has an airlock in this module, the right hand passageway just has a pressure-tight hatch.

The module is 7.2 meters in diameter and had two compartments. Each had a center cylindrical section 3.2 meters in diameter (a continuation of the Basic 12 M Spine). Both compartments could be divided into eight wedges via non-structural partitions. The center sections are for labs and workshops. The wedge rooms listed in the table. Each stateroom is double occupancy, to accommodate the 8 crew persons.

Wedge Rooms

Deck 1

Deck 2

Stateroom Alfa

Stateroom Charlie

Stateroom Bravo

Stateroom Delta

Bathroom

Bathroom

Lab

Lab

Lab

Lab

Lab

Lab

Galley

Command &Communication

Rec Room

EmergencyGear Storage

The Powered Flight Station plus the Personnel Accommodation has a total pressurized volume of 200 cubic meters, or 25 cubic meter per crew member (not counting the two passageways flanking the Flight Station). This is actually pretty luxurious. NASA figures a bare minium is 17 m3 per person, and a wet Navy enlisted man is lucky to have 8.3 m3. In addition the Basic Spine is available, but it is only pressurized when needed.

A 20-person Powered Flight Station and a 20-person Personnel Accommodation from a 20-meter Orion can be mounted on a 10-meter spine on a 10-meter Orion. In that case the sum of the Flight Station and Accommodation pressurized volume is 490 m3 or 24.5 m3 for each of the 20 crew.

Exploration mission personnel accommodations for 10 meter Orion (8-person crew). Life support for 8 crew members for 450 days.

Exploration mission personnel accommodations for 20 meter Orion (20-person crew). This 20-person module can also be mounted on a 10 meter payload stack, in which case the laboratories and shops in the upper part of the spine are omitted.

Orion Space Taxi. For use when several Orions fly in formation. Taxis are needed since Orion spacecraft are somewhat clumsy.dimension are approximate.

The spine has an internal volume of about 97 cubic meters. It contains spare parts, a repair bay, and miscellaneous payload.

There is also an airlock on the bottom allowing repair crews to enter the propulsion module. It is constructed out of materials with a low neutron activation potential. In addition, each pulse unit is only about 1kt (not a lot of neutrons), they are detonated 25 meters away from the propulsion unit (inverse square law), and the pulse unit channel filler plus tungsten propellant will provide shielding. It will be radiologically safe for crews to enter the propulsion module a couple of hours after the the most recent nuclear detonation.

USAF 4000 Ton Orion

USAF 4000 Ton Orion

Pusher PlateDiameter

26 m

Height

78 m

Wet Mass

3,629,000 kg(4,000 short tons)

Payload ShellVolume

11,000 m3

Pulse unit massbare unit

1,150 kg

Pulse unit massw/support rollers, etc.

1,190 kg

Pulse unit dim.

80 cm dia × 87 cm high

Pulse unitdetonation dist.

52.4 m ± 2 m

Pulse unitspecific impulse

4,300 seceffec: 3,600 sec

Detonation delay

1.1 sec

Pulse Unit Storage

Numberstorage levels

4

Number conveyorsper level

2

Number pulse unitsper conveyor

140

Total pulseunit capacity

1,120

15 km/s ΔV

30 km/s ΔV

Average initial accel

1.25 g

1.25 g

Total engineweight (dry)

1,233,000 kg

1,252,000 kg

Numberpulse units

926

1,500

Pulse systemmass(incl. coolant)

1,280,000 kg

2,068,000 kg

Payload mass

1,115,000 kg

308,000 kg

Most of the information and images in this section are from Aerospace Project Review vol 2 no 2. I am only giving you a "Cliff Notes" executive summary of the information, and only a few of the images and those in low resolution. If you want the real deal, get a copy of APR v2n2.

Orion drive spacecraft scale up quite easily. However, unlike other propulsion systems, they do not scale down gracefully. Surprisingly it is much more of an engineering challenge to make a small Orion. It is difficult to make a nuclear explosive below a certain yield in kilotons, and small nuclear explosives waste most of their uranium or plutonium. But it is relatively easy to make them as huge as you want, just pile on the megatons.

So in the 1960's when General Atomic made their first pass at a design, it was for a titanic 4,000 ton monster. By this time they realized that they would never get permission to launch an Orion from the ground under nuclear-bomb power, so the baseline was Mode III: a gargantuan chemical booster boosts the fully loaded Orion into LEO. So it does not carry the pulse units required to achieve orbit. For that the engine section would have to be taller.

This became the basis for the USAF Orion Battleship. They took the 11,000 cubic meters of the payload shell and stuffed it full of weapons.

Vehicle dimensions as of June 1963

Lower conical structure of engine section

Cutaway of engine section. Four pulse unit storage levels (Floor No1-4). Since Orion drive is not subject to the Every gram counts rule, the engine interior is full of massive girders.

The compressed-gas cannon that launches the pulse units down below the pusher plate. Note there is one pulse unit loader mechanism on each of the 4 floors. When a loader is closed, part of it forms a section of the cannon barrel. When the cannon is prepared to fire, all loaders are closed and form a continuous length of barrel. But only one of the loader barrel sections has a pulse unit in it.Blue sequence numbers refer to the pulse loader sequence, shown in diagram below

Details of conveyor tracks. The green is the trolley. It pushes a clutch of pulse units with a blade. The conveyor drive system (not shown) is a reel that yanks the conveyor cable. The conveyor cables for trolley's further back in the track are threaded through a tube to keep them from getting tangled (see upper right). Apparently there are only four or five trolleys per conveyor track.

Pulse unit loader mechanism
There is one of these on each of the four floors. Each has two "breech chambers", either of which can be this floor's section of the compressed-gas cannon barrel. While one chamber is closed and busy being a barrel section, the other chamber is open and being loaded with a pulse unit. At any point in time, on each floor there are closed chambers ensuring that the cannon barrel is complete. But only one floor at a time has a pulse unit loaded in the chamber, the other floors have empty chambers.The chambers are loaded alternating between the two conveyor tracks they share the floor with. Breech chamber lock holds the chamber shut when the barrel is pressurized

No1: Chamber assembly rotated so that the left chamber is over the cannon barrel.
No2: Restraining cylinder gets out of the way, positioning cylinder touches next pulse unit
No3: Conveyor reel pulls trolley, moving clutch of pulse units in general and next pulse unit in particular into position. Positioning cyclinder contracts in tandem with trolley.
No4: Restraining cylinder advances to lock all the pulse units in place except for the next pulse unit. Chamber assembly rotates to put right chamber over cannon barrel, and left chamber opens up
No5: Positioning cylinder moves out of the way, and loading cylinder pushes next pulse unit into left chamber
No6: Pulse unit is firmly seated inside left chamber
No7: Left chamber doors close over the pulse unit
No8: Chamber assembly rotates to put loaded left chamber over the cannon barrel

When the Orion nuclear pulse propulsion concept was being developed, the researchers at General Atomic were interested in an interplanetary research vessel. But the US Air Force was not. They thought the 4,000 ton version of the Orion would be rightsized for an interplanetary warship, armed to the teeth.

And when they said armed, they meant ARMED. It had enough nuclear bombs to devastate an entire continent (500 twenty-megaton city-killer warheads), 5-inch Naval cannon turrets, six hypersonic landing boats, and several hundred of the dreaded Casaba Howitzer weapons — which are basically ray guns that shoot nuclear flame (the technical term is "nuclear shaped charge").

This basically a 4,000 ton Orion with the entire payload shell jam-packed with as many weapons as they could possibly stuff inside.

Keep in mind that this is a realistic design. It could actually be built.

The developers made a scale model of this version, which in hindsight was a big mistake. It had so many weapons on it that it horrified President Kennedy, and helped lead to the cancellation of the entire Orion project. The model (which was the size of a Chevrolet Corvette) was apparently destroyed, and no drawings, specifications or photos have come to light.

By 1963, an Orion nuclear lift-off was not allowed. Here is the concept of using a chemical-powered Nexus booster to loft the Orion Battleship into orbit.Drawing by Scott Lowther 2013. Click for larger image

Both the Nexus and the Orion Battleship are huge.Drawing by Scott Lowther 2013. Click for larger image

William Black's 3D Orions

Here are some more CGI 3D rendering of Orion concepts created by Master Artist William Black. Click for larger images.

Orion-powered Discovery from 2001

Pre-production version of Discovery spacecraft for movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. The Orion propulsion system was later dropped. Click for larger image.

Like everything else in 2001, the good ship Discovery passed through many transformations before it reached its final shape. Obviously, it could not be a conventional chemically propelled vehicle, and there was little doubt that it would have to be nuclear-powered for the mission we envisaged. But how should the power be applied? There were several alternatives — electric thrusters using charged particles (the ion drive); jets of extremely hot gas (plasma) controlled by magnetic fields, or streams of hydrogen expanding through nozzles after they had been heated in a nuclear reactor. All these ideas have been tested on the ground, or in actual spaceflight; all are known to work.

The final decision was made on the basis of aesthetics rather than technology; we wanted Discovery to look strange yet plausible, futuristic but not fantastic. Eventually we settled on the plasma drive, though I must confess that there was a little cheating. Any nuclear-powered vehicle must have large radiating surfaces to get rid of the excess heat generated by the reactors — but this would make Discovery look somewhat odd. Our audiences already had enough to puzzle about; we didn’t want them to spend half the picture wondering why spaceships should have wings. So the radiators came off.

There was also a digression — to the great alarm, as already mentioned, of the Art Department — into a totally different form of propulsion. During the late 1950’s, American scientists had been studying an extraordinary concept (“Project Orion”) which was theoretically capable of lifting payloads of thousands of tons directly into space at high efficiency. It is still the only known method of doing this, but for rather obvious reasons it has not made much progress.

Project Orion is a nuclear-pulse system — a kind of atomic analog of the wartime V-2 or buzz-bomb. Small (kiloton) fission bombs would be exploded, at the rate of one every few seconds, fairly close to a massive pusher plate which would absorb the impulse from the explosion; even in the vacuum of space, the debris from such a mini-bomb can produce quite a kick.

The plate would be attached to the spacecraft by a shock-absorbing system that would smooth out the pulses, so that the intrepid passengers would have a steady, one gravity ride — unless the engine started to knock.

Although Project Orion sounds slightly unbelievable, extensive theoretical studies, and some tests using conventional explosives, showed that it would certainly work — and it would be many times cheaper than any other method of space propulsion. It might even be cheaper, per passenger seat, than conventional air transport — if one was thinking in terms of million-ton vehicles. But the whole project was grounded by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and in any case it will be quite a long time before NASA, or anybody else, is thinking on such a grandiose scale. Still, it is nice to know that the possibility exists, in case the need ever arises for a lunar equivalent of the Berlin Airlift...

When we started work on 2001, some of the Orion documents had just been declassified, and were passed on to us by scientists indignant about the demise of the project. It seemed an exciting idea to show a nuclear-pulse system in action, and a number of design studies were made of it; but after a week or so Stanley decided that putt-putting away from Earth at the rate of twenty atom bombs per minute was just a little too comic. Moreover — recalling the finale of Dr. Strangelove — it might seem to a good many people that he had started to live up to his own title and had really learned to Love the Bomb. So he dropped Orion, and the only trace of it that survives in both movie and novel is the name.﻿

Phase I design was for an expendable vehicle with a 200,000-pound-thrust NERVA II engine. It was to be used for several rocket stages on their planned Mars mission vehicle.

The Phase II design is what is pictured below. Specifically the Phase II class 1 hybrid model. Phase II design was for a reusable vehicle with a 75,000-pound-thrust NERVA I engine and a payload capacity of 50 tons. This was dubbed the Reusable Nuclear Shuttle (RNS). NASA had an optimistic RNS traffic model calling for 157 Terra-Luna flights between 1980 and 1990 by a fleet of 15 RNS vehicles. The shadow shield casts a 10 degree half-angle shadow, shielding was intended to reduce the radiation exposure to 10 REM per passenger and 3 REM per crew member per round trip to Luna and back.

The little attachable crew module has a mass of 9,000 kg. The NERVA engine is 18 meters long and 4.6 meters wide, intended to fit inside a Space Shuttle's cargo bay (the propellant tank can be lofted into orbit on a big dumb booster, but a nuke requires the human supervision). The propellant tank is 31 meters long and 10 meters wide.

The NERVA has a 1360 kilogram shadow shield on top, but it also relied upon propellant, structure, and distance to provide radiation shielding for the crew. Obviously as the propellant was expended, the shielding diminished. North American Rockwell tried to solve the problem with a "stand-pipe", in which a cylindrical “central column” running the length of the main tank stood between the crew and the NERVA I engine. The central column would remain filled with hydrogen until the surrounding main tank was emptied.

McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company dealth with the radiation problem by developing a “hybrid” RNS shielding design that included a small hydrogen tank between the bottom of the main tank and the top of the NERVA I engine. In the first diagram below, you can see the small tank included in the propulsion module length.

D. J. Osias, an analyst with Bellcomm, pointed out that the radiation dosage received by the astronauts riding the RNS was unacceptable. Osias stated that the maximum allowable radiation dose for an astronaut from sources other than cosmic rays of between 10 and 25 REM per year (0.1 and 0.25 Sievert). But the luckless astronaut on board the RNS would get 0.1 Sieverts every time the NERVA did a burn. Any external astronauts (not in the cone of safety cast by the shadow shield) at a range of 16 kilometers from a RNS operating at full power would suffer a radiation dose from 0.25 to 0.3 Sieverts per hour. Osias suggested that external astronauts not approach a burning RNS closer than 160 kilometers.

Nowadays the yearly limit of radiation exposure for astronauts is set at 3 Sieverts, with a career limit of 4 Sieverts. Which means an astronaut piloting a RNS through 40 total burns would be permanently grounded by reaching his career limit of radiation.

The RNS is assumed to have an operational life of 10 Terra-Luna round trips. After that the RNS is attached to a chemical booster and thrown into the Sun or somewhere remote.

You will find more information than you ever wanted to know about the RNS in these PDF files here, and here.

Note the secondary tank included in the propulsion module length. The liquid hydrogen contained therein is for extra radiation shielding.

Space Shuttle docking nose-to-nose with RNS, being careful to stay within the safe area cast by the shadow shield.

There are two mission types: the 8-burn mission and the 4-burn mission.

8-burn mission disadvantage: requires 4 extra burns for change-of-plane maneuvers. This increases the required ΔV to 8,495 m/s, and reduces the payload size to 45,000 kg. Advantage: you do not have to wait for a launch window, you can launch anytime you want.

4-burn mission disadvantage: mission launch windows occur only at 54.6 day intervals. Advantage: since you are not required to perform change-of-plane maneuvers the required ΔV is reduced to 8,256 m/s and the payload size is increased to 58,000 kg.

In both of these missions, it is assumed that the full payload is carried to Luna, where the payload is dropped off EXCEPT for the 9,000 kg that is the crew module. Presumably the crew wants something to live in for the trip back to Terra.

This is a 1965 design from NUCLEAR SPACE PROPULSION by Holmes F. Crouch. It seems to be the father of the NASA Nuclear Shuttle design. According to the book, it would have a single solid-core NTR engine with a specific impulse of 1000 seconds (i.e., an exhaust velocity of 9,810 m/s) and a ΔV capability of 15,000 m/s (which implies a mass ratio of about 4.6, which is a bit over the rule-of-thumb maximum of 4.0). The book estimates that an Terra to Luna Hohmann trajectory would take about 12,000 m/s ΔV, after you add in all the change-of-plane maneuvers and added an abort reserve. This would require about 60 hours to travel from the Terra to Luna, but that can be reduced to 20 hours by spending an extra 900 m/s.

In the second diagram, the ship is shown docked to something that looks suspiciously like the Space Tug. Note that they dock nose-to-nose so the lunar shuttle vehicle can stay inside the radiation shadow area.

One really exciting nuclear rocket potiential lies in Earth-Moon transport. The Moon is 208,000 n mi from the Earth. The mission concept simply is one of ferrying back and forth between Earth and Moon terminal orbits. We can think of the ferry terminals as 300 n mi Earth orbits and 100 n mi lunar orbits.

The essence of the lunar ferry concept is presented in Figure 11-8 (the one with the Earth-Moon orbits). the lunar vehicle would do all the propulsive legwork in the the terminal orbits and between the terminal orbits. Chemical systems would be employed as shuttle vehicles at the Earth terminius and at the lunar terminus. This would permit specialization in chemical systems where they are most capable: planetary launch and entry.

The nuclear ferry would have one rocket reactor with capability for multiple reuses, in-orbit replenishment, multiple restarts, and full nozzle maneuverability. We would expect the reactor to have a proven Isp on the order of 1000 seconds. It would have proven reliability, man-rating, pilot control, and long life. We would not expect the ultimate in solid-fueled reactor technology but we should be headed in that direction.

Note in Figure 11-8 that the ferry trajectory is in the form of a "figure-8." This is because it is necessary to transfer from one gravitational force center to another. Each section of the figure-8 can be thought of as an elliptical orbit: one focus at Earth and one focus at the Moon. The two ellipses "join" each other at a transfer region which is about 85% of the distance from Earth (the crossover occurs at about 180,000 n mi from Earth or about 28,000 n mi from the Moon). When going from Earth to Moon, the transfer point is called translunar injection. When going from the Moon to Earth, the transfer is called transearth injection. The injection maneuvers actually start well in advance of the trajectory crossover.

Caution is required when interpreting Figure 11-8. It gives the impression that the launching/entry trajectories, the rendezvous/docking orbits, and translunar/transearth ellipses are all in the same orbit plane with each other. This is not the case. We are dealing with noncoplanar orbit trajectories. Furthermore, they are variable noncoplanar trajectories which change from day to day and from month to month. As a consequence, the target plane — that plane connecting the Earth and Moon centers — "corkscrews" around the major axis of the figure-8 flight path. The corkscrewing of the ferry trajectory introduces fluctuations in the ΔV requirements.

Table 11-4 Nuclear Ferry ΔV Requirements

Maneuver

Feet per second

Earth Orbit Docking

1,750

Earth-Space Plane Changes

3,500

Earth to Translunar Injection

10,000

Translunar to Lunar Orbit

3,500

Lunar-Space Plane Changes

1,500

Lunar Orbit Docking

750

Lunar to Transearth Injection

3,500

Transearth to Earth Orbit

10,000

Midcourse Corrections

500

Abort Reserve

5,000

Total ΔV

40,000

A representative summary of the round trip ΔV requirements is given in Table 11-4. This listing includes all contingencies (a lunar mission can be performed with less ΔV than table 11-4 but the risk-potential increases). Note that total ΔV is 40,000 feet per second (fps). A single stage nuclear vehicle with an Isp of 1000 sec would have a ΔV capability of nearly 50,000 fps. Hence, there is some excess ΔV available.

The unused nuclear ΔV can be applied to reducing the trip time. The normal one-way trip time for a chemical propulsion system is about 60 hours (2 ½ days). Because chemical lunar missions border on marginal ΔV capabilities, the chemical trip time cannot be reduced much below 60 hours. In the case of nuclear systems, for an additional expenditure of 3,000 fps, the one-way trip time can be reduced to 20 hours. The effect of other ΔV expenditures on trip time is shown in Figure 11-9 (not shown), It can be seen that if an attempt is made to reduce the trip time below 20 hours, the extra ΔV requirements are disproportionate to the time gained. Therefore, a value of 20 hours will be selected as the nuclear ferry time base.

If the lunar terminal orbit is 100 n mi altitude, the orbit period is about 2 hours. If the lunar terminal activities necessitate as much as two orbit periods fur completion, the nuclear ferry turnaround could be made within 24 hours of Earth departure. If two nuclear ferry vehicles were used, we could have daily service to the moon and back! All-chemical lunar rocket systems could not possibly compete with this schedule.

The advantages of reduced lunar trip time are self-evident There is reduced time of confinement of astronaut, scientific, and technical personnel to the limited quarters of spacecraft. In-transit boredom and monotony are reduced. Less life support equipment is required: less oxygen, less food, less waste disposal. There is less exposure to weightlessness and less exposure to space radiation. The less the life protection equipment required, the more transport capacity for lunar basing supplies.

In the lunar terminal orbit, all exchange activities would take place at the pilot end of the nuclear ferry. This is because the propulsion reactor would be kept idling. The major features involved are presented in Figure 11-10 (middle image above). One feature not always self-evident is the need to off-load chemical propellants from the nuclear ferry to the lunar shuttle. To make the propellaut transfer, special cargo tanks on the nuclear ferry and special piping on the chemical shuttle would be required, It is assumed that chemical propellants for the shuttle vehicle probably could not be manufactured on the Moon and therefore would have to be transported from Earth.

From NUCLEAR SPACE PROPULSION by Holmes F. Crouch (1965)

Rocketpunk Large Fast Transport

Artwork by Rick Robinson

The deep space ship above (click on the image for full sized view) was inspired by the Travel Planner spreadsheet in the previous post, and modeled in the wonderfully simple and handy DoGA 3D modeler. The shuttle alongside is a rough approximation of the NASA shuttle, and thus a thorough anacronism in this image, but provided as a scale reference.

Of course you want some specifications of the ship. Even if you don't, you get them anyway:

Length Overall

300 meters

Departure Mass

10,000 tons

Propellant Load H2

5000 tons

Drive Mass

2000 tons

Keel and Tankage

1000 tons

Gross Payload

2000 tons

Flyway Cost

$5 billion (equivalent)

The payload includes a hab with berthing space for 50-200 passengers and crew, depending on mission duration, and a pair of detachable pods for 500 tons of express cargo, plus service bays and the like.

What this ship can do depends on its drive engine performance. If the drive puts out 2 gigawatts of thrust power — my baseline for a Realistic [TM] nuke electric drive — the ship can reach Mars in three months, give or take. (The sim gave 92 days for a 0.8 AU trip in flat space.) With a later generation drive putting out 20 gigawatts it can reach Mars in a little over a month, or Saturn in eight months.

The general arrangement of this ship is driven by design consideration — a nuclear drive that needs to be a long way from the crew, with large radiators to shed its waste heat; tanks for bulky liquid hydrogen; and a spinning hab section. Most serious proposals for deep space craft in the last 50 years have had more or less this arrangement — the movie 2001 left off the radiator fins, because in those days the audience would have been puzzled that a deep space ship had 'wings.'

A large, long-mission military craft, such as a laser star, might not look much different overall — replace the cargo pods with a laser installation and side-mounted main mirror, and perhaps a couple of smaller mirrors on rotating 'turret' mounts. Discussions here have persuaded me that heavy armor is of little use against the most likely threats facing such a ship.

Within these broad constraints, however, spaceships offer a great deal of design freedom, more than most terrestrial vehicles. Ships, planes, and faster land vehicles are all governed by fluid dynamics, and even movable shipyard cranes must conform to a 1-g gravity field. A spaceship, unless built for aerobraking, will never encounter fluid flow, and the forces exerted by high specific impulse drives — even torch level drives — are relatively gentle.

This ship might have had two propellant tanks, or half a dozen, instead of four. And the entire industrial assemblage of tanks and girders might be concealed, partly or entirely, within a 'hull' of sheeting no thicker than foil, protecting tanks and equipment from shifting heat exposure due to sunlight and shadow. Much of the ISS keel girder has a covering of some sort — in close-ups it looks a lot like canvas — that in more distant views gives the impression of a solid structure.

In fact the visual image of the ISS is dominated by its solar wings and radiators. The hab structure is fairly inconspicuous by comparison, like the hull of a sailing ship under full sail. This would be true to an extreme of solar electric ships; a 1-gigawatt solar electric drive would need a few square kilometers of solar wings. Even nuclear drives, fission or fusion, require extensive radiators — probably more than I showed — with other ship systems needing their own radiators, at varied operating temperatures. Unless the ship has an onboard reactor it must also have solar collectors for use when the drive is shut down.

All of which may do more to catch the eye than heavier but smaller structures such as the hab or even propellant tankage. And then there is color: the gold foil of the main ISS solar wings, for example.

Hollywood knows nothing of this (though I'm surprised they haven't picked up on the gold foil). Hollywood is no more interested in what real spaceships look like than it is in how they maneuver. This is only natural, even though we hard SF geeks complain. Hollywood doesn't care because its audience has almost no clue of what spaceships look like, or act like, getting most of their impressions from Hollywood itself.

The one actual spacecraft to have iconic visual status, the Shuttle, essentially looks like an airplane. The ISS has not yet acquired iconic status, though it may, especially after the Shuttle is retired. And perhaps it looks so unlike terrestrial vehicles that our eye does not yet know quite what to make of it.

As a point of comparison, watch aviation scenes in old movies, especially from before World War II. You'll see airplanes whooshing past (sometimes in pretty unconvincing special effects shots), but you will rarely see what is now a standard shot — a plane filmed from another plane in formation, hanging 'motionless' on the screen, clouds and distant landscape rolling slowly past, until perhaps the plane banks and turns away.

It is a standard shot because it is so very effective. But older movies rarely used it, because audiences would have had no idea what they were seeing. Everyone knew that airplanes were fast, and had at least some idea that their speed is what kept them in the air. A plane apparently hanging in midair would make no sense.

What changed all this, I would guess, is World War II. A flood of newsreel footage included many formation shots, and audiences gradually absorbed a feeling for what midair footage really looks like. When a postwar Jimmy Stewart enlisted for Strategic Air Command (1955), Hollywood — and its audience — were ready to see the B-36 and B-47 showcased in all their glory, including airborne formation shots.

I know what you bloodthirsty people are thinking — one good space war, and everyone will grok the visual language of space travel. Shame on you. Given enough civil space development, and time, people will get the hang of it.

The beauty of spaceships is in the eye of the beholder. The familiar aesthetics of terrestrial vehicles are as irrelevant to them as to Gothic cathedrals (which in some broad philosophical sense are themselves spaceships of a sort). General principles of design will provide some guidance. Even in making the quick thrown-together model above I found that slight changes in proportion could make the difference between a jumble of parts and a unity.

But the real visual impact of spaceships is something we will only learn from experience, by the glint of a distant sun.

The discussion thread about 'Industrial Scale of Space' veered, among other things, into a discussion of patrol missions in space. My first reaction was that (so long as you aren't dealing with an interstellar setting) there is no place in space for wartime patrol missions. But the matter might be more complicated, and for story purposes probably should be.

According to The Free Dictionary, patrol is The act of moving about an area especially by an authorized and trained person or group, for purposes of observation, inspection, or security. This fits my own sense of the word, and is in fact a bit broader, 'security' including SSBN patrols, which are not observing or inspecting anything, just waiting for a launch order if it comes.

In a reductionist way you could say that all military spacecraft are on patrol, since they are all on orbit, and if they are orbiting a planet they have a very regular 'patrol area.' But this is not what most of us have in mind. We picture a patrol making a sweep through an area, looking for anything unusual, ready to engage any enemy they encounter, or report it and shadow it if they cannot engage it.

Back in the rocketpunk era it was plausible that, say, Earth might send a patrol past Ceres to see if the Martians had established a secret base there. But (alas!) telescopes 'patrolling' from Earth orbit can easily observe the large scale logistics traffic involved in establishing a base; watch it depart Mars and track it to Ceres. If you want a closer look you can send a robotic spy probe. If you engage in 'reconnaissance in force' by attacking Ceres, that is a task force, not a patrol.

In an all out interplanetary war there may be plenty of uncertainty on both sides, but very little of it can be resolved by sending out patrols.

But of course all-out war is not the context in which the Space Patrol became familiar. I associate it with Heinlein's Patrol; apparently the 1950s TV series had an independent origin (unlike Tom Corbett, who was Heinlein's unacknowledged literary child).

The rocketpunk-era Patrol, which in turn gave us Starfleet, was placed in the distinctly midcentury future setting of a Federation. This is as zeerust as monorails. But plausible patrolling is not confined to Federation settings. It can justified in practically any situation but all out war.

Orbital patrol in Earth orbital space will surely be the first space patrol, and could be imagined in this century. It might initially be a general emergency response force, because travel times in Earth orbital space are short enough for classical rescue missions. On the interplanetary scale, with travel times of weeks or more likely months, rescue is rarely possible. But eventually power players will want some kind of police presence or flag showing in deep space.

As so often in these discussions, I picture a complex and ambiguous environment in which policing, diplomacy, and sometimes low level conflict blur together. To take again our Earth-Mars-Ceres example, there are kinds of reconnaissance that cannot be carried out by robots (short of high level AIs). If Ceres closes its airlocks to liberty parties from a visiting Earth patrol ship, that conveys some important intelligence information.

The ships that perform these missions will be fairly large (and expensive). They must carry a hab pod providing prolonged life support for a significant crew: at least a commander and staff, SWAT team of espatiers, and some support for both.

Let us say a crew of 25—which is cutting the human presence very fine. Now we can venture a mass estimate. Allow 100 tons for the hab compartment plus 25 tons for crew and stores plus 75 tons other payload, for a total payload of 200 tons. Let the drive bus be 200 tons for the drive, including radiators, and 100 tons for tankage, keel, and sundry equipment.

Our patrol ship with a crew of 25 thus has a dry mass of 475 tons, mass fully equipped 500 tons, plus 500 tons propellant for a full load departure mass of 1000 tons. Cost by my usual rule of thumb is equivalent to $500 million, perhaps $1 billion after milspecking, expensive compared to military planes, cheaper than major naval combatants.

This is no small ship. If the propellant is liquid hydrogen the tanks have a volume of about 7000 cubic meters, equivalent to a 7000 ton submarine. The payload section is about two thirds the mass of the ISS and of roughly comparable size, though the hab is probably spun giving the prolonged missions.

Armament is necessarily modest. The 75 tons of additional payload allowance probably must include a ferry craft for the espatiers and an escort gunship or two, plus their service pod, leaving perhaps 15-20 tons each for kinetics and a laser installation. The laser might be good for 20 megawatts beam power, with plug power from the 200 megawatt drive engine.

This ship is no laser star, but the laser is respectable. Assuming a modest 5 meter main mirror and a near IR wavelength of 1000 nanometers, at a range of 1000 km it can burn through Super Nano Carbon Stuff at rather more than 1 centimeter of per second. Its armament is also rather 'balanced.' My model shows that this laser can just defeat a wave of about 1000 target seekers, each with a mass of 20 kg, closing at 10 km/s—thus a total mass of 20 tons, comparable to its kinetics payload allowance.

Deploying troops, or personnel in general, is impressively expensive: About three fourths of the payload and cost of a billion dollar ship goes to support and equip a crew of 25, with perhaps a dozen espatiers. For comparison the USS Makin Island (LHD-8) displaces 41,000 tons full load, carries a crew of 1200 plus 1700 Marines, and costs about $1.8. So by my model it costs about as much to deploy one espatier as 80 marines.

And this ship is about the minimum patrol package, so standing interplanetary patrol is a costly and somewhat granular business, something not everyone can afford.

This is the same one from the other day, only dressed up with a nice logo and some stats. These are realistic capabilities made courtesy of the charts and other information available from Atomic Rocket and inspiration from Rick Robinson's Rocketpunk Manifesto.

My PL differs from the one in Rick Robinson's article in a few key areas. The main difference is that it is not made for long hauls. It only has a delta v of about 8200 m/s. This will not get one far in the solar system but it allows a forward deployed Patrol Craft a sufficient "range" to perform many of the missions we discussed in the last post on Building a Space Navy. Our little A-Class has enough Delta V to shape a light-second orbit around a convoy in deep space, conduct SAR missions anywhere in cis-lunar space, or to reach any moon of Saturn from any other moon. Obviously, this rocket is mostly propellant (mass ratio 5). If you drew lines through the side view of the rocket that bracket the docking rings, you would encompass the entire pressurized volume. I've got to say, it's nice to work on a warship for a change — I don't have to make it economical to run!

One of the interesting things about this design is actually the freedom the little carried craft gives me. It was a throw-away touch, originally — a design borrowed from another project. But as I got to looking at the little thing, I realized that it's about the size of the Saturn V stage/Apollo/LM stack. That means it should be able to go from Earth Departure to Lunar orbit. That means that it has the Delta V to ferry crew to and from a Patrol Craft on station away from the convoy. That means, like submarines, our Patrol Craft can have two crews and stay out for a lot longer than otherwise. This is one of those realistic touches that I hope add to the charm of the rocket's design.

ed note: a 1500 nanometer near infrared laser with a 10 meter fixed mirror can have a 4 centimeter spot size out to 220 kilometers or so. A 4 meter mirror can have a 4 centimeter spot size out to 87 kilometers or so.

Rocketpunk Solar-Electric Ship

Solar-electric deep space drive engines, according to Isaac Kuo at sfconsim-l, may soon achieve a power output density of about 400 watts per kilogram, when operating near Earth distance from the Sun. If you do not see what this sort of technical information could possibly have to do with so lovely an image as gossamer wings, you probably reached this blog by accident, have no poetry in you, or both.

What makes it potentially relevant as well as beautiful is that 400 watts/kg is in hailing distance of the 1 kW/kg that Isaac and I independently chose as a benchmark for nuclear-electric drive, and generally as needed for relatively fast interplanetary travel. A spacecraft using solar electric drive can thus reach the same interplanetary speeds as its cousin, though it will take somewhat longer to reach cruising speed, and somewhat longer to slow down. It is a fair prospect that with a few decades' further progress, by the time we're actually building interplanetary ships the performance of the two drives will be comparable.

This is a big deal, because solar-electric space drive is technically and operationally elegant, while nuclear-anything drive, and especially nuclear-electric drive, is not. A solar electric drive has almost no moving parts. A nuclear-electric drive has lots of complex internal plumbing to draw energy from the reactor and incidentally keep it from melting. This plumbing operates under very nasty conditions, radioactivity being nothing to sheer high temperatures.

Plumbing is a big part of what makes spaceships so expensive, because it is complicated, full of parts that can jam, and as there is never a plumber around when you need one, it has to work perfectly for months at a time. (Even if you have a plumber in the crew, taking a nuclear reactor apart en route is a pain.) Robinson's Second Law: For each gram of physics handwavium in futuristic space tech, expect about a ton of plumbing handwavium.

Nuclear drives are also full of nasty fissionable stuff, tricky and dangerous to work with, requiring heavy shielding to get anywhere near (and radiation goes a long ways in space), requiring extreme security measures in handling and storage, and socially uncomfortable no matter how careful your procedures are.

In short, anything that gets rid of nuclear reactors in space is a huge plus on every level of operation, from spacecraft construction and maintenance to obtaining funding. Solar electric drive with comparable performance banishes nuclear reactors from the inner Solar System. You don't need them for travel, and you certainly don't need them for anything else, because one thing the inner Solar System has an ample and endless supply of is sunshine. Those skies are never cloudy all day.

Solar electric power does gasp for air, or for sunshine, as you move outward from the Sun. At Mars, thrust is about half as much as near Earth. In the asteroid belt it is about a fifth to a tenth, at Jupiter one twenty-fifth, at Saturn one percent. To give this some context, a one-milligee drive, baseline performance near Earth, nudges a ship along at about 1 km/s per day, reaching orbital transfer speeds in a week or two. At Jupiter, the drive delivers some 40 microgees, and a ship puts on about 1 km/s per month, thus the better part of a year for orbital transfer burns.

The time lost due to sluggish acceleration is only half as much, some six months, and a Jupiter mission would likely be upwards of a year each way even for a nuke-electric ship. So until we have regular bus service to Jupiter, the time cost is not dreadful. The inner Solar System, through the asteroid belt, can be efficiently traveled by solar-electric drive, which ought to hold us through this century and into the next.

Of course nuclear-electric ships can be built, but Isaac also pointed out a subtle effect that could sideline them. Over the decades to come we will build solar-electric probes, and later ships, steadily developing the technology, while nuke-electric remains a paper tech, falling further and further behind. A serious advance into the outer system will require a faster drive in any case—by that time perhaps a fusion drive, which can still be two orders of magnitude below the magical performance level of a 'torch.'

Let's mentally sketch-design a solar electric ship. Departure mass with full propellant load is 400 tons, broken down as follows:

Payload, 100 tons

Structures and fitting, 50 tons

Drive engine, 100 tons

Propellant, 150 tons

The drive engine we make an advanced one, meeting the baseline standard of 1 kW/kg. Thus rated drive power is 100 megawatts. If the exhaust velocity is 50 km/s (specific impulse ~5000 seconds), 80 grams of propellant is shot out the back each second. Thrust is 4000 Newtons, about 1000 lbs, giving our ship the intended 1 milligee acceleration at full load. Mass ratio is 1.6, so total ship delta v available on departure is 23.5 km/s, enough for a pretty fast orbit to Mars.

We could 'overload' this ship with a much bigger payload, another 400 tons (thus 500 tons total payload). Max acceleration falls to half a milligee, and mission delta v to 10 km/s—still ample for the Hohmann trip to Mars, for slow freight service. Since we want to go there ourselves, we will stick with the faster version and configure it as a passenger ship. Each passenger/crewmember requires cabin space, fittings, life support equipment, provisions and supplies for the trip, plus the mass of the passenger and baggage—in all, say, about 3 tons per person, so our ship carries some 30-35 passengers and crew.

The cabin structure of this ship might be about the size of a 747 fuselage, divided into berthing compartments or roomettes, diner/lounge area, galley, storage spaces, and life support plant. If the propellant is hydrogen, the tankage will be about the same size; if other stuff is used, the tankage will be smaller. All in all, the hull portion of our ship is comparable in size and mass to a jumbo jet. As space liners go this is a modest-sized one, as its modest passenger/crew capacity shows.

Now, finally, the gossamer wings part. We accounted for the mass of the drive engine, including solar collectors, but have not yet looked at the physical size of the solar panals. They are big. Big. If we assume that about 35 percent of the sunlight that hits them is converted into thrust power, they capture some 500 watts per square meter at 1 AU—meaning that for a 100 megawatt drive you need 200,000 square meters of solar panels, a fifth of a square kilometer.

This trim little interplanetary liner is physically enormous, or at least its solar wings are. The 'wingspan' might well be one kilometer, 'wing chord' then being 200 meters. In sheer size our ship is much bigger than any vehicle ever built (though freight trains can be up to about 2 km long).

Angular, squared-off, an instrument of technology—but how can this ship be anything but a thing of beauty, an immense gleaming-black butterfly? If that is too fluttery, say a dragonfly, or to be prosaic an equally immense gleaming-black kite. Indeed the prototype configuration is much like a box kite, likely for later versions as well.

Something is magical about such ships and travel aboard them. The drive thrust and power performance is the same as for a nuke-thermal ship, but now the milligee acceleration feels appropriately gentle, not merely weak, as our ship glides from world to world on its great sun-wings. (This is not, however, solar sailing, but a sun-powered 'steamship.')

The modest capacity of this immense little ship adds to the charm. With only about 35 passengers and crew this is no tawdry impersonal cruise ship. It all has somewhat the flavor of airship travel as we imagine it—perhaps encouraged by the zeppelin-like proportions of the vehicle, the gondola dwarfed by the feather-light structure that carries it. In early decades the ship will be much more utilitarian, a transport rather than a liner—don't ring for the steward; it's your turn in the galley. But if we go to the planets we will eventually go in liners.

The scenery out the viewports* won't change much after the first week or so spiraling out from Earth. (In fact you probably ride a connecting bus up through the Van Allen belts.) By then it is time for reading, cards, conversation, and flirting, till Mars looms close and the ship begins its long graceful swoop down to parking orbit.

Bon voyage!

* I disagree with Winch. All but the most utilitarian spaceships will have a few viewports, because while there is often nothing to see, when there is it is breathtaking. And fundamentally, why else are we going into space?

The Cargo Tug Slingshot is from Jerry Pournelle's short story Tinker. In the story, it rescues the BoostShip Agamemnon.

The spacecraft's spine is a strong hollow tube built to transmit thrust from the aft engines to the fore array. The array is composed of detachable fuel pods of deuterium fuel and cadmium reaction mass. Fuel and remass are fed to the engines through the center of the ship's spine. The cargo goes fore of fuel pod. There are a couple of pods of fuel/remass attached to the hull.

Crew cabins are torus-shaped, arranged around the outside of the spine. Foremost torus is control deck. Next aftwards is living quarters for crew. Next comes deck with office and passenger quarters. Furthest aft is deck with shops, labs, and main entryway to the ship. Entryway doubles as a small store catering asteroid miners, to supplement the ship's income. Decks are connected by airlocks for safety.

Artwork by Rick Sternbach (1975)

Artwork by Rick Sternbach (1975)

There wasn't much doubt on the last few trips, but when we first put Slingshot together out of the wreckage of two salvaged ships, every time we boosted out there'd been a good chance we'd never set down again. There's a lot that can go wrong in the Belt, and not many ships to rescue you.

I shrugged and began securing the ship. There wasn't much to do. The big work is shutting down the main engines, and we'd done that a long way out from Jefferson (asteroid colony). You don't run an ion engine toward an inhabited rock if you care about your customers.

The entryway is a big compartment. It's filled with nearly everything you can think of: dresses, art objects, gadgets and gizmos, spare parts for air bottles, sewing machines, and anything else Janet or I think we can sell in the way-stops we make with Slingshot. Janet calls it the "boutique," and she's been pretty clever about what she buys. It makes a profit, but like everything we do, just barely.

(Nine tons of beef) I donated half a ton for the Jefferson city hall people to throw a feed with. The rest went for about thirty francs a kilo.
That would just about pay for the deuterium I burned up coming to Jefferson.

(ed note: approimately 16,000 francs per metric ton of deuterium)

"I don't think you understand. You have half a million tons to boost up to what, five, six kilometers a second?" I took out my pocket calculator. "Sixteen tons of deuterium and eleven thousand reaction mass. That's a bloody big load. The fuel feed system's got to be built. It's not something I can just strap on and push off—"

I switched the comm system to Record. "Agamemnon, this is cargo tug Slingshot. I have your Mayday. Intercept is possible, but I cannot carry sufficient fuel and mass to decelerate your ship. I must vampire your dee and mass, I say again, we must transfer your fuel and reaction mass to my ship.

"We have no facilities for taking your passengers aboard. We will attempt to take your ship in tow and decelerate using your deuterium and reaction mass. Our engines are modified General Electric Model five-niner ion-fusion. Preparations for coming to your assistance are under way. Suggest your crew begin preparations for fuel transfer. Over."

The Register didn't give anywhere near enough data about Agamemnon. I could see from the recognition pix that she carried her reaction mass in strap-ons alongside the main hull, rather than in detachable pods right forward the way Slinger does. That meant we might have to transfer the whole lot before we could start deceleration.

The refinery crew had built up fuel pods for Slinger before, so they knew what I needed, but they'd never made one that had to stand up to a full fifth of a gee. A couple of centimeters is hefty acceleration when you boost big cargo, but we'd have to go out at a hundred times that.

They launched the big fuel pod with strap-on solids, just enough thrust to get it away from the rock so I could catch it and lock on. We had hours to spare, and I took my time matching velocities. Then Hal and I went outside to make sure everything was connected right.

Slingshot is basically a strongly built hollow tube with engines at one end and clamps at the other. The cabins are rings around the outside of the tube. We also carry some deuterium and reaction mass strapped on to the main hull, but for big jobs there's not nearly enough room there. Instead, we build a special fuel pod that straps onto the bow. The reaction mass can be lowered through the central tube when we're boosting.

Boost cargo goes on forward of the fuel pod. This time we didn't have any going out, but when we caught up to Agamemnon she'd ride there, no different from any other cargo capsule. That was the plan, anyway. Taking another ship in tow isn't precisely common out here.

Everything matched up. Deuterium lines, and the elevator system for handling the mass and getting it into the boiling pots aft; it all fit.

Ship's engines are complicated things. First you take deuterium pellets and zap them with a big laser. The dee fuses to helium. Now you've got far too much hot gas at far too high a temperature, so it goes into an MHD system that cools it and turns the energy into electricity.

Some of that powers the lasers to zap more dee. The rest powers the ion drive system. Take a metal, preferably something with a low boiling point like cesium, but since that's rare out here cadmium generally has to do. Boil it to a vapor. Put the vapor through ionizing screens that you keep charged with power from the fusion system.

Squirt the charged vapor through more charged plates to accelerate it, and you've got a drive. You've also got a charge on your ship, so you need an electron gun to get rid of that.

There are only about nine hundred things to go wrong with the system. Superconductors for the magnetic fields and charge plates: those take cryogenic systems, and those have auxiliary systems to keep them going. Nothing's simple, and nothing's small, so out of Slingshot's sixteen hundred metric tons, well over a thousand tons is engine.

Now you know why there aren't any space yachts flitting around out here. Slinger's one of the smallest ships in commission, and she's bloody big. If Jan and I hadn't happened to hit lucky by being the only possible buyers for a couple of wrecks, and hadn't had friends at Barclay's who thought we might make a go of it, we'd never have owned our own ship.

When I tell people about the engines, they don't ask what we do aboard Slinger when we're on long passages, but they're only partly right. You can't do anything to an engine while it's on. It either works or it doesn't, and all you have to do with it is see it gets fed.

It's when the damned things are shut down that the work starts, and that takes so much time that you make sure you've done everything else in the ship when you can't work on the engines. There's a lot of maintenance, as you might guess when you think that we've got to make everything we need, from air to zweiback. Living in a ship makes you appreciate planets.

Space operations go smooth, or generally they don't go at all.

When we were fifty kilometers behind, I cut the engines to minimum power. I didn't dare shut them down entirely. The fusion power system has no difficulty with restarts, but the ion screens are fouled if they're cooled. Unless they're cleaned or replaced we can lose as much as half our thrust—and we were going to need every dyne.

Agamemnon didn't look much like Slingshot. We'd closed to a quarter of a klick, and steadily drew ahead of her; when we were past her, we'd turn over and decelerate, dropping behind so that we could do the whole cycle over again.

Some features were the same, of course. The engines were not much larger than Slingshot's and looked much the same, a big cylinder covered over with tankage and coils, acceleration outports at the aft end. A smaller tube ran from the engines forward, but you couldn't see all of it because big rounded reaction mass canisters covered part of it.

Finally it was finished, and we could start maximum boost: a whole ten centimeters, about a hundredth of a gee. That may not sound like much, but think of the mass involved. Slinger's sixteen hundred tons were nothing, but there was Agamemnon too.

The idea is to avoid the drawback of the ion drive, the fact that the pathetic thrust of around 100 Newtons means it had an equally pathetic acceleration of about 0.0001 meters per second. Ordinarily this would not be a problem, except it means the spacecraft takes over twenty days to crawl through that glowing blue field of radioactive death they call the Van Allen Belts. A NERVA style nuclear thermal rocket can zip through the belt in a couple of hours, but its abysmal exhaust velocity makes it a propellant hog.

Stuhlinger's plan was a two-stage spacecraft. The NERVA-II stage gets the spacecraft through the radiation belt before the astronauts are fried, then that stage is ditched. The ion drive with its vastly superior exhaust velocity then takes over and gets the expedition to Mars using only a tea-cup's worth of propellant.

In Phase 1, for each of the four spacecraft in the expedition, 3 Saturn V will boost the ion-drive stage components into orbit, where the components will be assembled (12 Saturn V launches total).

In Phase 2, for each of the four spacecraft, 2 Saturn V will boost the NERVA components into orbit (one for the NERVA, one for the propellant tank), where the components will be assembled (8 Saturn V launches total). The NERVA stages will be attached to the ion stages.

There are four spacecraft in the expedition, in case one or more have to be abandoned for whatever reason. In a pinch a single spacecraft can carry all 16 expedition members home, abet in cramped conditions.

The mission starts with the crew inside the landers. If anything goes wrong during the initial burn, the landers will be the crew's abort-to-Terra vehicles. The NERVA-II stage burns for 30 minutes, passing through the Van Allen belts in 2 hours. About 17 minutes into the burn, exhaust is vented to spin up the spacecraft to 1 revolution per minute, for artificial gravity. The burn terminates when the spacecraft is at an altitude of 3450 kilometers.

The crew leaves the lander, and climbs down the 179 meter arms to the habitat modules. The NERVA stage is jettisoned, and the ion engines are started. They will burn for a while, then the ship will coast.

145 days into the mission, the ion engines are restarted to decelerate into high Mars orbit. The crew enters the Mars lander and land on Mars.

The unmanned spacecraft will continue the ion burn 24 days to move the ship to a low 1000 kilometer orbit. It would take even longer if the spacecraft had to deal with the mass of the lander.

After a month on Mars frantically doing sciene, the crew enters the lander's ascent stage and blast of to rendezvous with the orbiting ion spacecraft. The ascent stage is discarded to save on mass. This allows the spacecraft to spiral out to Terra transfer orbit in only 18 days.

The trip home will take 255 days, with deceleration starting halfway through.

Ion drive stage on top of NERVA II NTR stage

Ion drive stage

Left to right:Ernst StuhlingerNuclear-ion rocket (minus the NERVA-II stage)Saturn V (at same scale)NERVA-II Saturn V payload (larger scale)Note the arm-span of the ion rocket is more than twice the height of the Saturn V.

This monster is the Uprated GCNR Nexus grown to three times the size. The document says that it can deliver 453 metric tons (one million pounds) not to LEO, but to Lunar surface. Doing some calculations on the back of an envelope with my slide rule, I estimate that it can loft 4,600 metric tons into LEO. But also with a proportional increase in radioactive exhaust. The data in the table is for the Terra lift-off to Lunar landing mission.

Translunar Space Patrol

This is from NUCLEAR SPACE PROPULSION by Holmes F. Crouch (1965). It is a solid-core nuclear thermal rocket used by the outer space version of the Coast Guard to rescue spacecraft in distress. In the diagram below, note how the rear fuel tanks are cut at an angle. This is to prevent any part of the tank from protruding outside of the shadow cast by the nuclear shadow shield. Also note that while the central tank must be load-bearing, the strap on tanks do not. This means the side tanks can be of lighter construction.

With the advent of lunar exploration and round trip lunar transport, both chemical and nuclear, there inevitably will arise malfunctions and emergencies. There will arise communication difficulties, navigational errors, propulsion breakdowns, and structural failures. There are possibilities of collisions between spacecraft and of fatal damage from matter in space. More likely, however, are onboard concerns of life-support malfunctions, auxiliary power irregularities, compartment over pressurization (in some cases, explosions), cargo shifting, and unforeseen disorders. These are the realities of increased space travel.

In anticipation of spaceflight realities, there would be need for a nuclear rescue ship operating in translunar space. The primary role of such a ship would be to save human life and those extraterrestrial specimens aboard any ill-fated lunar vehicle. A secondary role would be to salvage the spacecraft if at all possible.

This means that the rescue ship would require propulsive capability to drastically change orbit planes and altitudes. It would require excess ΔV to proceed with dispatch to rendezvous with a disabled spacecraft. In addition, capability would be required for transferring personnel and equipment, making repairs to a disabled vehicle, and even taking it in tow if conditions warranted. The latest advances in crew facilitation, passenger accommodations, repair shops, navigational devices, and communication equipment would be required. As an introductory concept, one arrangement of a nuclear rescue ship is presented in Figure 11-11 (see above).

A particular feature to note in Figure 11-11 is the use of two nuclear engines. Each engine would be of the lunar ferry vintage and, therefore, would be sufficiently well developed and man-rated for rescue ship design. These engines would be indexed by a nominal Isp of 1000 seconds; they would have a short time overrating of, perhaps 1100 seconds. This overrating implies conditional melting of nuclear fuel in the reactor for emergency maneuvers and dispatch.

A rescue ship would be characterized by a large inert weight compared to a regular transport vehicle. This means that large magnitudes of engine thrust would be required. However, during periods of non-emergencies, low thrusts could be used. The vehicle F/Wo characteristics (Thrust-to-weight ratio) would vary over a wide range: possibly from 0.1 during non-emergencies to 1 during emergencies. Two engines would provide the high thrust capacity for emergencies. During non-emergencies, one engine could be left idling; the other engine could provide low thrust for economic cruise. Furthermore, two engines would provide engine-out capability for take-home in the event of malfunction in one of the engines. For reactor control reasons, the two reactors would have to be neutronically isolated from each other. For this purpose, note the neutron isolation shield in Figure 11-11.

(ed note: Nuclear reactors are throttled by carefully controlling the amount of available neutrons within the reactor. A second reactor randomly spraying extra neutrons into the first reactor is therefore a Bad Thing. "Neutronically isolated" is a fancy way of saying "preventing uninvited neutrons from crashing the party.")

Figure 11-12.

A suggested patrol region for the rescue ship is indicated in Figure 11-12 (see above). Note that a rendezvous orbit has been designated so that the rescue ship could replenish its propellant from the nuclear lunar transport system. By having rendezvous missions with nuclear ferry routes, rescued personnel, lunar specimens, and damaged spacecraft parts could be returned to Earth without the need for the rescue ship returning. Also, rescue ship crew members could be duty-rotated this way. This would increase the on-station time of a nuclear rescue ship.

From NUCLEAR SPACE PROPULSION by Holmes F. Crouch (1965)

VISTA

VISTA

Wet Mass

6,000,000 kg

Dry Mass

1,835,000 kg

Mass Ratio

3.27

ΔV

200,000 m/s

Thrust

2.4 × 105N

Exhaust Velocity

170,000 m/s

Thrust Power

20.4 gigawatts

Specific Power

11.1 kW/kg

Propulsion

InertialConfinementD-T Fusion

Width

170 m

Height

100 m

VISTA is the Vehicle of Interplanetary Space Transport Application, from a study by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It looks like a tiny flying saucer in the diagrams but it is actually freaking huge. Blasted spacecraft is taller than Godzilla.

Tiny pellets with a deuterium-tritium compount core surrounded by about 50 grams of propellant drop out of the bottom of the cone. At the pellet target position a battery of laser modules zap the pellet with enough energy to initiate a fusion explosion. The propellant blast bounces off the 12-Tesla superconducting magnetic coil to provide thrust. Thrust is throttled by varying the pellet detonation rate from 0 to 30 detonations per second.

With 100 metric tons of payload, VISTA can travel to Mars and back to Terra in six months flat.

Unfortunately about 75% of the fusion energy is wasted, creating no thrust (escaping as neutrons and x-rays). But the remaining 25% is more than powerful enough to give the ship 200 kilometers per second of delta V. The spacecraft is shaped like a cone in an attempt to minimize how much of the wasted energy hits the ship as deadly radiation (only about 4% of the wasted energy irradates the spacecraft).

This design uses a nuclear thermal rocket with currently available materials, and using water as propellant (a nuclear-heated steam rocket or NSR) instead of liquid hydrogen). This limits it to a specific impulse below 200 seconds which is pretty weak. However, numerous authors have shown that a NSR could deliver 10 and 100 times more payload per launched hardware than a H2-O2 chemical rocket or a NTR using liquid hydrogen. This is despite the fact that the chemical and NTR have much higher specific impulses. NSR work best when [1] the reactor can only be low energy, [2] there are abundant and cheap supplies of water propellant, and [3] mission delta-Vs are below 6,500 m/s.

The original article describes the water extraction subsystem at the lunar pole. It is a small reactor capable of melting 112.6 metric tons of ice into water (92.6 metric tons propellant + 20 metric tons payload) in about 45 hours. This will allow the water truck to make 192 launches per year, delivering a total of 3,840 metric tons of water per year.

Since the water truck is lifting off under the 0.17 g lunar gravity, its acceleration must be higher than that or it will just vibrate on the launch pad while steam-cleaning it. The design has a starting acceleration of 0.25 g (about 1.5 times lunar gravity).

The landing gear can fold so the water truck will fit in the Space Shuttle landing bay, but under ordinary use it is fixed. The guidance package mass includes radiation shielding. In addition, the guidance package is on the water truck's nose, to get as far as possible away from the reactor. The thrust structure and feed lines support the tank and anchor the reactor. The 25% growth factor is to accommodate future design changes without having to re-design the rest of the spacecraft. The reaction control nozzles perform thrust vector control. They take up more mass than a gimbaled engine, but by the same token they are not a maintenance nightmare and additional point of failure.

The reactor supplies about 120 kilowatts to the tank in order to prevent the water from freezing. The reactor mass is 50% more than minimum. The lift-off burn is about 20 minutes durationa and consumes 0.7 kg of Uranium 235.

At Deimos, only about 4.55 megawatts will be needed to melt 299,000 metric tons of ice into water (50,000 tons for payload + 249,000 tons for propellant). The engine nuclear reactor can supply that with no problem. The water must be distilled, because mud or dissolved salts will do serious damage to the engine nuclear reactor. By "serious damage" I mean things like clogging the heat-exchanger channels to cause a reactor meltdown, or impure steam eroding the reactor element cladding resulting in live radioactive Uranium 235 spraying in the exhaust plume.

Nuclear thermal rocket was designed to be a very conservative 100 megawatts per ton of engine. Engine will have a peak power of 12,142 Megawatts (for stage [1] and [2]). This works out to a modest engine temperature of 800° Celsius, and a pathetic but reliable specific impulse of 190 seconds. A NERVA could probably handle 300 megawatts per ton of engine, but the designer wanted to err on the side of caution. This will require much more water propellant, but there is no lack of water at Deimos.

This design uses a nuclear thermal rocket using water as propellant (a nuclear-heated steam rocket or NSR) instead of liquid hydrogen). This limits it to a specific impulse below 200 seconds which is pretty weak. However, numerous authors have shown that a NSR could deliver 10 and 100 times more payload per launched hardware than a H2-O2 chemical rocket or a NTR using liquid hydrogen. This is despite the fact that the chemical and NTR have much higher specific impulses. NSR work best when [1] the reactor can only be low energy, [2] there are abundant and cheap supplies of water propellant, and [3] mission delta-Vs are below 6,500 m/s.

It is true that electrolyzing the water into hydrogen and oxygen then burning it in a chemical rocket will get you a much better specific impulse of 450 seconds. But then you need the energy to electrolyze the water, and equipment to handle cryogenic liquids. These are just more things to go wrong.

In the table, [1], [2], and [3] refer to different segments of the journey from Deimos to LEO.

[2] At LMO periapsis, 1,280 m/s burn using the Oberth Effect to inject the water ship into Mars-Earth Hohman transfer orbit

[3] 270 days later at LEO periapsis, 752 m/s burn using the Oberth Effect to capture the water ship into Highly HEEO

[x] Water ship does several aerobrakes until it reaches an orbital propellant depot in LEO

Total thrust time is about 10 hours.

Water ship's propellant has 15,137 metric tons extra as a safety margin. When it arrives, hopefully some of this will be available.
It will take 322 metric tons of propellant for the empty water ship to travel from HEEO to Deimos, or 1,992 metric tons to travel from LEO to Deimos.
Plus 0.139 gigawatts of engine power and 10 hours of thrust time.

Traveling from Deimos to LEO will consume about 12.7 kg of Uranium 235. Given the fact that Hohmann launch windows from Mars to Earth only occur every two years, the fuel in the engine nuclear reactor will probably last the better part of a century before it has to be replaced. The engine will be obsolete long before then.

Widmer Nuclear Mars Mission

RocketCat sez

Another ship that will give old rocket fans a sense of haunting familiarity. Whether you saw it in the old Life Science Library volume Man in Space or as the Project SWORD toy, it is another bit of your childhood that would actually work.

This is from a 1963 study called Application Of Nuclear Rocket Propulsion To Manned Mars Spacecraft by Thomas Widmer. Unfortunately I cannot seem to find a copy, so most of the data comes from abstracts. It is an expansion of an earlier 1960 Lewis Research Center study.

Lewis Study

Lewis Nuclear Mars Mission

Propulsion

Solid core NTR

Delta V

19,800 m/s

Mars lander mass

40,000 kg

Terra lander mass

13,600 kg

Terra lander wingspan

6.7 m

Crew size

7

Wet mass

614,000 kg

Mass per crew

102,000 kg

The Lewis vehicle would have a habitat module with two levels, and 35 square meters of floor per level (3.3 meter radius). The storm cellar is a cyliiner at the centerline, and doubles as a sleeping quarters. The mass of the storm cellar depended upon the maximum allowable radiation exposure for the 420 day mission:

The Widmer vehicle was sized to have four crewmen for a 15 month mission to Mars. Just like the Bono Mars Glider, it was optimistically scheduled to depart in 1971, to take advantage of the next Hohmann launch window.

The solid core nuclear thermal rocket used a fast spectrum refractory metal core, with an inherent re-start capability and resistance to fuel cladding erosion allowing long burnning times. Long engine life and multiple restarts are extremely important factors in reducing gross vehicle weight, since they permit a low initial thrust to weight ratio (small engine), and eliminate the need for staging engines after each firing interval.

Furthermore, the smaller size of a fast metallic core provides an engine weight advantage of at least two to one over a thermal-graphite core engine of the same thrust rating. Smaller core frontal area also permits a similar reduction in shield weight. That is, the smaller the top of the nuclear reactor core, the smaller the anti-radiation shadow shield has to be, and thus the lower the shield mass.

The spacecraft components are boosted into orbit by four Saturn V boosters, one launch for the propulsion/payload module and three launches containing 4 loaded propellant tanks each. There will be a total of twelve propellant tanks. Each tank contains 20,000 kilograms of liquid hydrogen. A SNAP-9 or SNAP-50 nuclear power unit provides electricity to the cryogentic re-condensation system. The SNAP radiator is the cone shaped area just forward of the rocket engine.

The minimum delta V I hand calculated as 7,900 m/s. It will actually be larger, since the spacecraft jettisons spent propellant tanks and the first stage of the Mars excursion module.

Original Widmer design

Step 1

The propulsion and payload module is shown in its launch configuration. The hydrogen tank and crew compartment secions are 6.7 meters in diameter. Attached to the forward end of the tank, a chemically propelled Mars excursion module will permit the landing of a two man exploration party, after the spacecraft has attained Mars orbit.

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Step 2

One of the three tanker vehicles is shown in the launch configuration. A structural shell supports four nearly spherical tanks, each of which contains over 20,000 kilograms of liquid hydrogen. By employing auxiliary structure to reinforce the tanks during booster ascent, the weight of the tankage can be minimized. After installation on the nuclear rocket spacecraft, the light weight tanks will be exposed to only moderate acceleration (less than 1g), rather than the 7 or 8g experienced in attaining initial orbit.

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Step 3

The separate hydrogen tanks are being attached to the propulsion module in low Earth orbit. Each tank is insulated with multi-layer radiation foils to minimized hydrogen boil-off. In addition, a cryogentic re-condensation system may be employed for those tanks which are not emptied until the later phases of the mission. This system would be powered by a SNAP-9 or SNAP-50 type nuclear electric generating system located between the main propulsion reactor and the aft end of the central tank. The radiator for the SNAP powerplant can be seen just aft of the tank. In practice, it may be necessary to move this radiator into a position well to the rear of rocket engine during coast periods, so that head load on the hydrogen tank will be minimized. An attractive possibility exists for eliminating the auxiliary power reactor by integrating a liquid metal heat exchange loop with the rocket reactor core. This approach not only reduces system weight, but also tends to minimize the problem of after-heat removal from the engine.

Click for larger image

Step 4

In this view, the general arrangement of the crew quarters can bee seen. A two deck command module will contain the life support system, living accommodations, communications gear, experimental equipment, and a control center. Solar flare protection is provided by a vacuum jacketed capsule projecting downward into the main hydrogen tank. This "storm cellar" is lined with carbon shielding to augment the 2.4 meter thick annulus of liquid hydrogen which surrounds the capsule. Shielding is designed to restrict the integrated crew dose to less than 1 Sievert for the complete mission.

Note that the proposed configuration does not provide an artificial "g" capacity. If zero "g" cannot be tolerated for the long duration of an interplanetary mission, a rotating cabin section could be factored into the design. However, this approach would result in a substantial increase in spacecraft gross weight due to structural integration problems with an artificial "g" design.

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Step 5

The orbital launch maneuver is shown here. A total of six tanks will be emptied to depart from Earth orbit and achieve the Mars transfer ellipse. In the event of an abort during the escape maneuver, the chemically propelled Mars landing craft could be used for return to Earth orbit.

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Step 6

Staging of tanks during Earth escape propulsion is shown. Total propellant consumed up to injection for the Mars transfer is about 127 metric tons. In coast configuration two of the six tanks emptied during Earth escape will remain attached. This provides a degree of redundancy against the possibility of a meteoroid puncture in any of the loaded tanks, since propellant could be transferred into the remaining empty tanks. If no puncture occurs, the empty tanks are released immediately prior to the firing interval for Mars capture.

Transit time to Mars is about 180 days.

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Step 7

The Mars capture maneuver produces an eccentric orbit of about 560 kilometer perigee and about 5,000 kilometers apogee; thereby minimizing propellant requirements, while still providing a close view of the planet for final evaluation of landing sites. Four of the last six external propellant tanks are emptied during capture, but only two are jettisoned. Two are retained for meteoroid puncture redundancy until just before the Mars escape firing interval.

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Step 8

After transferring to the Mars excursion module, two of the four crew members fire braking rockets to bring the entry vehicle orbit perigee into the planetary atmosphere. The major portion of the deceleration is then accomplished by aerodynamic drag. After maneuvering to an altitude of about one kilometer, the landing craft is maneuvered into a vertical attitude for final approach. One minute of hovering capacity allows for some possible changes in landing site, and three shock absorbing struts are extended for the final touchdown. The winged entry vehicle represents one of several possible shapes, and lenticular or conical configurations might also be employed, depending upon the degree of aerodynamic maneuvering desired during entry.

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Step 9

The Mars excursion module is shown in its landing position. In addition to the two man crew capsule, approximately 2,300 kilograms of scientific equipment and portable life support gear can be transported to the Martian surface. Equipment will include a portable meteorological station, a powerful radio for communication with Terra, and a tracked car for exploration.

Gross weight of the excursion module prior to departure from orbit will be about 15,900 kilograms if hydrogen/oxygen propulsion is used. Stay time on the planet is restricted to about 5 days, due to limited payload and the rapid deterioration in launch window for the Earth return phase of the mission.

Note that the upper part of the Mars excursion module is a modified Gemini.

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Step 10

All equipment, except for the minimum life support capsule and 150 kilograms of soil samples, will be abandoned on the surface. The chemically propelled second stage of the landing vehicle uses the first stage structure as a launching platform for the return to Mars orbit.

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Step 11

After rendezvous with the nuclear rocket spacecraft, the excursion module second stage is abandoned in the eccentric parking orbit.

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Step 12

This illustration shows the Mars escape configuration of the spacecraft. During this maneuver, the last two external tanks are emptied, as is the aft compartment of the main tank. The forward end of the main tank, which surrounds the solar flare shelter, still contains hydrogen throughout the Mars-Earth transfer.

Transit time to Terra is about 200 days

Click for larger image

Step 13

Upon approaching Earth, the two empty tanks are released, and the nuclear rocket engine is used to brake the vehicle into a high altitude parking orbit. The crew will then transfer to a ferry vehicle for Earth re-entry. Alternatively, it would be possible to reduce the velocity increment required of the interplanetary spacecraft by employing direct re-entry from the Mars transfer ellipse. However, this would require that an Earth re-entry vehicle be transported through the entire mission, thereby increasing the weight carried on the spacecraft. Since direct re-entry alleviates the need for a large propulsion maneuver at the terminal end of the mission, little or no propellant would be available for solar flare shielding during the return flight coast period. The flare shield weight would then have to be increased to insure crew protection in the "empty" vehicle.

Gallery

Display model of NASA Lewis study at the New York Space Flight Report to the Nation (1961).

Original Widmer design

Updated GE study rocket, replacing NERVA with an open-cycle gas core nuclear thermal rocket. That would increase the exhaust velocity from 8 km/s to a whopping 50 km/s or so, with a drastic increase in the payload mass. Artwork by Ed Valigursky for Life Science Library series Man in Space (1967)